Head Space
by JohnGreenGirl
Summary: Gwen Harper and Spencer Reid's love story, chronicled through a set of diary entries made by Gwen. Their story is tumultuous, but what do you expect from loving none other than B.A.U. S.S.A. Dr. Spencer Reid?
1. Entry One

Allow me to begin this by introducing myself. My name is Gwen Reid, but it used to be Gwen Harper. I am twenty-five years old. I have a three year old daughter named Paige. My therapist suggested I start writing this journal as a way to cope. I know journals are supposed to be a private thing, but I plan on (hopefully) getting this thing published, because I think it will help others.

Now let me go back to the beginning, when I was nineteen:

I was in college, working towards a bachelor's degree in psychology with a special emphasis in schizophrenia. All of my friends were telling me I was graduating in unemployment; you have to have at least a master's to actually _use _a psychology degree. But I was fortunate in that I didn't necessarily have to go to college. As the oldest in the Harper family, my parents were planning on handing down their very successful bookshop to me and taking an early retirement after my graduation, which was just fine for me.

I didn't want to be a psychologist, anyway. I just wanted to be able to understand my sister.

Maggie was my twin sister. _Identical _twin sister, in every way except one: when we were five, she was diagnosed with childhood onset schizophrenia when her vivid 'daydreams' and 'imaginings' turned violent and she took a pair of scissors to her leg because she had hallucinated that spiders lived in her veins.

The doctors feared for Maggie's safety, of course, but also for mine and our little brother Eric's safety as well. They didn't feel it would be prudent to keep Maggie at home. For a while, my parents moved us from our two story Victorian in Virginia to a duplex with my mother, Eric, and I on one side and Dad and Maggie on the other.

But that arrangement ended when Maggie managed to unlock the garage connecting the two houses and come into our side, where Mom just barely caught her covering Eric's face with a pillow due to the voices telling her to kill him. Eric was only eight months old at the time.

From that point on, Maggie resided at Bennington Sanitarium. She was their youngest ward in history. She was better there, if only for the steady stream of medication they gave her. She was safe, though, and my brother and I were safe.

The truly unfortunate part of Maggie's story is that she was a musical savant if ever there was one. She may have been only five, but she had mastered the piano, violin, cello, and flute. Now, I don't mean that Maggie had lessons for all of these things. The piano, yes, but we both did. I picked it up quickly, but Maggie picked it up immediately, by ear. Our piano teacher was impressed, so she tested other instruments. It was like Maggie was meant to play them.

In Bennington, when she was having good days, she mastered other instruments. By the time we were nineteen she could play 17 instruments perfectly, including of all things a didgeridoo. I can't even imagine how many she'd be able to play if it weren't for all the time she spent locked away in her brain's machinations.

I know it seems like this story should have started when I was five, but I've chosen to start it at nineteen because that was the first time I realized I was not alone.

I was visiting Bennington because mine and Maggie's birthday had been that Tuesday, but Bennington only offered visiting hours on Sundays so we had to wait until then to bring Maggie her birthday cupcakes and her presents.

I remember how petulant Eric was. He was only fourteen at the time, so I couldn't really blame him.

"I hate coming here," he grumbled. "It makes me feel like a freak."

"Maybe it's haunted," I told him. "Like all those sanitarium ghost stories you like to read." A fascination with old tuberculosis and psychiatric wards was about the only thing Eric had taken from Maggie living in Bennington back then.

Mom and Dad had bought Maggie a HAPI drum, which is kind of like a truncated steel drum. I knew they'd rather get Maggie more elaborate instruments, but Bennington only had so much room. Their common room area for the patients already had an organ my parents had 'donated', which really meant they bought it for Maggie but had to allow others to use it, too.

Eric had put together a photo album of his most recent accomplishments, which included him joining the varsity football team despite being a freshman in high school. We never told Eric that his older sister had once tried to kill him.

And me? I bought Maggie clothes. I visited her more often than the other members of my family, so I was the only one who realized how ragged and threadbare Maggie's clothing was becoming.

"Happy birthday, Maggie, honey," Mom said when we walked into her room. It was immediately obvious that Maggie was not having one of her good days.

It was always hard seeing Maggie on her bad days. It was also pretty weird, considering that it was like looking into a mirror. The same auburn hair and hazel eyes reflected back to me. The same soft bow shaped lips, only Maggie's were snarling.

She was muttering to herself while she rocked back and forth on her bed. The nurse attending to the wing where Maggie's room was started apologizing profusely.

"I'm so sorry, I know y'all came to celebrate." She looked back worriedly at Maggie. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt none if y'all tried to talk to her."

But I knew better. I knew that Maggie, the real Maggie beneath all that, wouldn't want us to see her that way. She would be embarrassed when her hallucinations ended, if she remembered us coming. So I excused myself and left my parents and an unwilling Eric to try their best.

I liked Bennington. Is that a weird thing to say? That you like a sanitarium? The staff tried to make it more homey than hospital-like. There were homemade quilts on a lot of the couches around the hallways and even though they were fake, there were flowers on all the tables. I was going to go outside and take a walk in the gardens Bennington had, but I was stopped on my way through the commons area.

"Oh, Gwen! I was hoping you'd be here today!" It was Diana Reid. She'd been at Bennington for about four years, but she'd never had any visitors even though she got a lot of letters from her son.

"Gwen, come here, honey. I want you to meet my Spencer."

I knew a lot about Spencer Reid before I met him. I knew he was a genius. I knew he had graduated high school at 12; college, for the first time, at 16. He had a master's degree by the time he was 18, when he gained custody of Diana and had her committed to Bennington when it was obvious her schizophrenia was worsening. Spencer had joined the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI earlier that year, around his twenty-second birthday. Diana Reid was, if nothing else, a proud mother who loved to gush about her son.

What I didn't know about Spencer was that he would have translucent brown eyes that reminded me of brown sugar or that he'd be overdue for a haircut and have to keep pushing his too-long hair behind his ears.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Gwen Harper." I smiled at him. He was adorably nervous. I guess being around people who weren't encumbered by social propriety so often during my visits at Bennington had taken away any shyness I used to have. Let me tell you, if you want to meet some truly honest people, visit a psych ward.

"S-Spencer Reid," he said, standing and fumbling a tiny bit to shake my hand.

"It's nice to finally put a face to all of Diana's stories." Diana patted the seat beside her, so I sat down to join them.

"Mom," Spencer said, "you don't have to tell everyone you meet about me."

"Of course I do, Spencer! You're in the FBI. You're a national hero in addition to being an egghead. How can I not brag?"

I could see that Spencer was uncomfortable, so I smiled at him to try to put him at ease. He blushed and dropped those brown sugar eyes to the floor and I swear my heart just melted for him.

"Is this your first time here, Spencer?"

"Uh, yeah. It is. I've been, um, really busy the past few years." Spencer was shy. It was cute.

"Being as great as you are takes a lot of time, baby," Diana said, reaching over to smooth Spencer's hair where it had fallen forward.

"What do you do in the FBI?" I asked, because I really was curious. All Diana ever told anyone was the Spencer was an agent, but not what he did exactly.

"Oh, I work in the Behavioral Analysis Unit. We study the behavior and patterns of people in order to catch dangerous persons, like serial killers. Did you know the average person walks by thirty-eight murderers in their life time?"

I didn't mean for the surprise to show so much on my face, but I felt my eyes widening.

"Oh!" I said, utterly floored. "I'm going to be locking my doors a lot more often now."

I knew exactly why Spencer hadn't been visiting his mother, and neither of them had to say a word for me to figure it out. I knew because I had felt the same way I was certain Spencer was. Most people with schizophrenia begin showing signs in their early twenties.

It was something I'd been fearing since around my sixteenth birthday.

"Gwen, could you show Spencer around a bit? You know they don't let us wander unattended too much around here."

"Oh, sure, Diana," I told her with a smile. Diana was a sweet woman. She taught literature classes to the other patients, and sometimes I would sit in on her lessons after coming to see Maggie.

So I showed Spencer some basic things: the gym, the art room, the cafeteria. Then I take him out to the garden, where I intended to go in the first place. I was really surprised my parents and Eric were still in Maggie's room. Maybe she had come out a bit to talk to them. Or maybe they were doing what they often had to do, which is talk at her and pretend at conversation.

"It's a nice place," Spencer said.

"Yeah," I agreed. "You don't have to be scared to visit her, you know."

Spencer looked absolutely shocked at my words, like he thought I'd read his mind or something.

"I'm not—I mean…"

I smiled at him and placed a hand on his arm. "It's okay. I know it's scary. I'm scared, too. My identical twin sister is in there. How can I _not _be scared I will be, too? I just wanted you to know it gets a little less scary, and you're not alone in being scared."

If I'm being honest, it almost looked like Spencer was going to cry.

"Excuse me," he said when his phone began to ring. "That's probably a case."

He started walking away quickly, but before he flipped his phone open to answer it he turned back to me and said, "Thank you."


	2. Entry Two

My parents' bookstore is one of my favorite places. I loved it growing up and I actually lived in the apartment over it for most of college.

When my father took it over from his parents fresh out of college himself he did a lot of renovations to it. Exposed the original brick walls and put in thick, soft carpeting and expanded it to include an area for people to hang out in. Eventually he bought the building next door to it, where the apartment was, and knocked the separating wall down to make even _more _space, this time for a stage so the shop could host open mic nights, book signings, etc.

I think it's pretty easy to see why I love it so much.

In high school I thought it was the coolest thing that a lot of college kids hung out at the bookshop. But when I was actually _in_ college and knew most of the people milling around, it got kind of annoying.

"I wish we could put a little something extra in the coffee," Isaac said. He was our barista; if Isaac wasn't there, we weren't selling coffee. Not for nothing, either—Isaac was personable and fast, and we paid him amazingly for a barista position.

"More alcohol in the morning isn't the only way to deal with a hangover, you know." I didn't get to have an official office like my parents did, so when I was dealing with paperwork I usually did it out on the floor near Isaac's coffee counter.

"Gwen Harper, you are the absolute worst at being in college. You always do your homework, you actually go to all of your lectures, and you have a job with real responsibilities. Don't you ever have any fun?"

"To each his own, my friend," I said, shaking my head. Isaac was my age, and like everyone else our age the new freedom of college was just as, if not more, intoxicating than the steady stream of alcohol now available.

"Well I want _that_ to be my own," Isaac reached over his counter to smack me on the head so I would look up. "Please break me off a piece of that chocolate bar, would you?"

I rolled my eyes at Isaac. He could be so dramatic, which had nothing to do with the fact he was gay and everything to do with the fact that Isaac loved attention and was fearless about getting it. I've never known someone as brave and without a filter as Isaac.

"Huh," I said, looking over at the guy Isaac was referring to. He had wide shoulders that his t-shirt hardly contained and I could see the end of a tattoo peeking out of his shirt sleeve. "He looks too old to be in college."

Not that we didn't get customers older than twenty-two; most of them just browsed the books instead of confidently sitting down at a random table and giving a pair of girls a heart melting smile.

"Kill me now," Isaac said, clutching his apron over his heart. "It will hurt less."

"I thought you _had_ a boyfriend," I said to Isaac but he just rolled his eyes.

"Rodrigo's old news. I thought I told you that."

Indeed he hadn't, but I didn't have time to tell him that because Isaac's dream man got up from the table and started walking towards mine. I glanced over at Isaac. _You lucky bitch, _he mouthed.

"Excuse me," the man said. "Do you work here?"

"Did my mountain of order receipts give me away?" I asked, looking up from my computer.

"No, those girls over at that table did. Could I ask you some questions?"

I knitted my brow. "About what?"

The guy took that as an invitation to sit down, and he motioned with his hand to someone across the room. I followed his gaze to see Spencer Reid emerge from a row of books after re-shelving a copy.

I turned back to Isaac. "Have you been Googling sketchy stuff or something?"

"Oh, yes. It's what I do in my free time, look up incriminating things on my boss's Internet server. Why, is the FBI here?"

"Yes, actually."

"Ma'am, how do you know we're FBI?" The man sitting at my table asked at the same time Spencer nervously said, "Oh. H-hi, Gwen."

"Wait, you know her, kid?"

"We've met before," Spencer said. His companion looked him up and down with a teasing look, making Spencer blush.

"I'm Agent Derek Morgan. You already know Reid. We're out here investigating a potential suspect. Have you seen this guy?" Derek Morgan asked, handing me a police sketch.

It wasn't unreasonable that the guy hadn't been in the store. He looked college age, anyway. But we got a lot of business and it wasn't like I was there all day, every day.

"If he's been here, I don't remember the face. Hey, Isaac, come look at this," I said, waving him over from behind his counter.

"Nope, not a clue. I'm sure Mr. Harper would let you look at the security footage if you want, though." Isaac directed the entire sentence purely at Derek, ignoring Reid standing beside him. His tone was a little more friendly than necessary.

"Well," Derek said, obviously trying to contain a laugh after Isaac went back to his station. "We'll leave this here with you." Derek pulled my notepad toward him and a pen out of his pocket. "And here are our numbers. You know, in case you see anything."

He scrawled his out before turning the pad toward Spencer.

"C'mon, kid. Give the girl your number." The teasing look was back in his eyes and it made Spencer blush again. He almost dropped the pad when Derek handed it to him.

"You two have a good day," Derek said.

"Nice meeting you, Derek. Bye, Spencer." I said. Isaac was pretending to be stocking the tea trays, but I knew he was really facing the mirror behind the coffee counter so he could watch Derek Morgan leave.

"Bye, Gwen," Spencer said with a shy smile.

I saw Derek give Spencer a small shove through the shop's front windows.

"There's a criminal loose on the streets of Montclair and you're getting flirted with by the FBI. This world is a crazy place."

"Oh, please, Isaac. Spencer wasn't flirting."

Isaac looked toward me with a winning smile. "I never said it was Spencer."


	3. Entry Three

Before anyone can start thinking I was snatched up by the suspect Spencer and Derek were looking for only to be saved from my damsel in distress position by Spencer, that didn't happen. It probably would have been really cool and terrifying, but apparently I wasn't the suspect's 'type'. I didn't even know serial killers _had _a type until the day the news conference aired.

With the permission of the family, a blonde woman who introduced herself as FBI B.A.U. Liaison Agent Jennifer Jareau showed pictures of the victims. All of them had long, dark hair.

_Huh,_ I thought. _What a coincidence._ And then I looked up serial killers because I was curious if it actually was a coincidence. It's not. Serial killers really like similar victims. Lucky for me, not only was my hair too light it was also cut in a chin length bob at the time.

I was right about him being college-aged. They didn't have a name at all though; I guess the guy didn't have any priors. Agent Jareau showed the same sketch Derek and Spencer had given me. Whoever the guy was, his features were so generic I didn't know how they'd ever find him. And the only reason they had a sketch, according to Agent Jareau, is because one of the victims had disappeared after leaving a local bar with a stranger and her friend had happened to get a look at the guy.

They didn't have a lot to go on with the guy despite him most likely being a local.

The news conference was airing on the evening news, after I had closed up shop and was already upstairs in my apartment. I always felt safe in that apartment. The only way to get out was to go downstairs and through either the front or back door of the shop, which meant the only way in was through the front or back door, too. Since it was a shop with a lot of expensive stuff, and their daughter was living above it, my parents had installed cameras and a very loud, very annoying, very easy to set off alarm system.

Still, when my phone started ringing while I was watching Agent Jareau speak, it made me jump a little.

"Mom," I said. "You can't just call people when there's a serial killer on the news! That's right out of a horror movie, I almost had a heart attack."

"Oh, good, you are watching it. I wanted to make sure you knew what was going on. I know it's hard to keep up with current events when you're in college. I didn't want you to be out of the loop on something like this."

"Even if I hadn't watched the news two of the agents stopped by the shop, remember? Dad put the sketch they gave me and Isaac in the front window."

"I know, honey. Listen, I know you go see Maggie every Sunday, but I'd rather you stay closer to home until this person is caught. We'll call tomorrow and let them know to tell Maggie why you won't be in."

I rolled my eyes at how protective my parents still were, but I couldn't fault them. I understood it was because they couldn't protect Maggie no matter how hard they tried. I let it slide, but Eric had a hard time with it. He was just such a teenage boy.

"She'll understand, Mom."

I wasn't one of the guy's intended victims, but I was there when he was arrested two weeks later.

I was in my art class, sketching some milk jugs the teacher had put on a pedestal and backlit. I think we were supposed to be learning about how to draw in shadows or something. Usually we left two doors wide open: the actual classroom door and the door that led to the outside because the painting room was connected to the sketching room and sometimes the paint fumes were entirely too much.

But on that day, Mic got a phone call. More often than not, she would ignore her phone if it went off, but she answered this call and suddenly looked very concerned. Quietly, so as not to disturb us, she shut and locked both doors.

"Guys," she said, coming into the middle of the room to stand in front of the milk jugs. "We're on lock down. Well, as much of a lockdown as a college campus can be. I'm sure you've all seen the news; apparently the killer is a student here on campus."

Mic turned off the music we usually had playing during class, closed all the blinds, and turned off the lights. It reminded me of the dangerous person drills we always had to practice in grade school, even though we were fortunate enough to never have to use them for real.

Everyone was deathly quiet, which is probably what made the gunshots that came fifteen minutes later so scary. One girl started crying quietly. I was doodling in the dim light we had left, but when the gunshots sounded I dropped my charcoal pencil and it busted across the floor.

"Where do you think that was?" someone asked in a whisper. They were loud, but not loud enough that I would think they were coming from our building.

It was another 10 minutes before there came a knock on the door. Mic peeked through the blinds before opening it wide enough to reveal a dark haired man in a suit and a bullet proof vest with 'FBI' emblazoned across it.

"I'm Agent Aaron Hotchner. The suspect has been captured, and the campus is open again. There is police tape near the fountain in the quad; the scene is still being processed so that area of the campus is still not accessible to students. Thank you for your cooperation."

Near the fountain? That was nowhere near our building. How strong was that gun? And why was there a scene? Was someone dead?

We were allowed to leave, though we were told that classes for the rest of the day were canceled and we were again reminded not to go near the center of campus.

Everyone coming out of the buildings looked like shell-shocked zombies, and I'm sure I was the same. This kind of thing happened on the news, to other people. It wasn't supposed to happen to you.

Since the center of campus was a no-go zone I had to walk all the way around campus to get back to where I had parked my car that morning.

My walk took me to where Agent Jareau was releasing a statement about the events. Not keen on accidentally appearing on the news, I ended up with a group of other students waiting for the impromptu interview to end.

"There was a death," Agent Jareau said. Her look and tone of voice was very professional, but you could just feel how annoyed she was with the reporters. "However, we are not releasing any details at this time. No further questions." And with that she stepped quickly away and slid into the backseat of a waiting black car.

To say the streets were congested would be an understatement. Curious people were milling around, both in cars and on foot, trying to get a glimpse of what had happened. To add to the chaos, there was an ambulance parked not far down from where Agent Jareau spoke to the press.

"It was just a graze, we really don't need to do this here," I heard a familiar deep voice. It was Derek Morgan, apparently wounded in the confrontation and unhappy about having to sit on the back of the ambulance while an EMT dressed his wound.

"We need to stop the bleeding at least. You'll probably need stitches," the woman told him and Derek huffed his breath. I was going to walk right by the ambulance, going with the flow of the crowd of students around me, when a hand on my arm stopped me.

It was Spencer. He looked confused, like he didn't understand why he had done what he just did. Like Agent Hotchner, he was wearing a bulletproof vest over his clothing.

"I'm, um, I'm glad you're okay," Spencer said, with a cute, nervous smile. I smiled back at him. He was quite a bit taller than me, so that I had to tilt my head to look at him.

"I'm glad you're okay, too, Spencer."

His smile grew wider and he opened his mouth to say something else I think, but he was interrupted by Derek.

"Lover boy," he yelled, even though we were only a handful of feet away from him. "Let's go. We got reports to file, and I don't want to spend all night doing paperwork."

The comment bought color into Spencer's cheeks and he stammered out a goodbye before going over to Derek, who ruffled his hair with his good arm.

I was far from opposed to seeing more of Spencer Reid, I just hoped it wasn't always because we were at Bennington at the same time or because of a murderer being on the lose.

I didn't see Spencer again for almost a month. When I did, I was sitting in one of the window seats in the shop, away from the much busier café area where Isaac was serving. I had one of my dense psychology books in my lap and Isaac's special half milk-, half white-chocolate hot cocoas by my side.

"Is it okay if I join you?" a voice asked, and I looked up to see Spencer in casual clothes for the first time. Faded jeans replaced the slacks I'd seen him in previously, and he was wearing a Cal-Tech t-shirt under an unzipped sweatshirt. The only thing that hadn't changed was the converse on his feet.

"Go ahead," I said, moving my legs to make room for him.

He glanced at my psychology textbook before saying, "I don't mean for this to sound weird, but when you told me your sister is your identical twin but she's the only one that showed signs of childhood schizophrenia, I was kind of confused. The general consensus is that identical twins are exactly alike in genome, so it didn't make sense that Maggie would have schizophrenia and you wouldn't. So I looked it up and apparently, despite having identical DNA, one identical twin can show signs of a hereditary illness while the other is fine because of environmental factors that can essentially turn a certain marker on a gene on or off."

I was impressed that someone with no medical training had cracked something that confused my doctors for years.

"I never knew that," I said. "So it's just luck of the draw that I didn't develop it, too?"

"Basically, yeah. But it's like that with a lot of things. Someone can go their whole life carrying the genes that predisposes them for a certain type of cancer and never actually develop the cancer because nothing in their environment triggers it."

I couldn't help but smile while Spencer was talking. I think it made him nervous, though, because he suddenly touched his face and said, "What?"

"You looked all of that up because a stranger in a sanitarium told you that her twin sister has schizophrenia but she doesn't?"

Spencer blushed again and ducked his head so that some of his brown curls fell forward across his cheek.

"Well, yeah, I did." Isaac was suddenly beside me, two mugs in his hands.

"You two look like you need some refills," he said, handing a mug first to me and then to Spencer. When I took mine into my hand I felt something squishy on the bottom of it. It felt like it was wrapped in foil of some kind.

Prodding at it for a second made me realize what it was: Isaac had taped a condom to the bottom of my mug.

I glared up at him, but he was busy asking Spencer what it was like working with the Greek god Derek Morgan.


	4. Entry Four

Being in the FBI, Spencer didn't exactly have set work week hours. I think that might be why there was never a spoken agreement that Spencer would visit the bookshop when he had some time off, because there was no telling when that would be. But that's what happened.

It wasn't regular at all. The next time Spencer visited after that first day in the window seat it was only a week later. He came bearing a gift from his mother: a copy of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight._

The only problem was, I wasn't there when he came by. I was in class. Instead he left the book with Isaac, along with a note.

_My mom said you never got to read this even though you sat in on her lecture over it. She wanted you to have a chance to read it. By the way—did you know that this was inspired by the mythical Irish hero Cu Chulainn? _

It made me smile to think that Spencer might talk with his mother about me.

The note was so entirely _Spencer_, with the little factoid added on at the end like an afterthought. When I opened up the book there was writing in the margins that did not match Spencer's handwriting from his note. Some of it was in careful cursive, little notes about other works that were written around the same time as _Sir Gawain_ and the themes of the book and how they connected with the time period it was written in. Other notes were in a shaky version of the cursive notes, and not a lot of them made sense, though Spencer's name came up in them a lot.

I realized Spencer had given me his mother's personal copy to read, and inside were glimpses of the schizophrenia he feared he'd inherit.

Maggie tried to milk every detail possible from me about Spencer when I would go to visit.

"Diana's been telling people her son is sweet on a girl," she said, smiling wide. Maggie was sitting in bed. She'd broken a few toes when she was resisting the strong male nurses during one of her lapses.

"Oh, has she?" I asked, pulling my knees up to my chest. I was sitting in bed with her even though the nurses really didn't like for me to do that. They were always telling me that if Maggie started to have an episode, it wouldn't be safe. I didn't care, though. If I wanted to sit with Maggie, I was going to do it.

"Don't try to tell me you don't like him. I see that blush." Despite her broken toes, Maggie was looking well. Her hair was very long, unlike mine. They shaved it when she was little and wanted to try shock therapy. It didn't help and Maggie had refused to cut her hair since. Someone had braided it and wrapped into a halo around her head for her.

"He's older than I am," I said, tracing the swirling pattern on Maggie's bedsheets. "He's twenty-three."

"Dad is six years older than Mom," Maggie reminded me. "He seems sweet. I've seen him with his mom."

"He's in the FBI. What would he want with a college freshman girl?"

"You're so difficult, Gwen," she said, smacking me with one of her pillow.

Secretly I was very excited about the idea of seeing Spencer Reid again.

Most of our clientele consisted of teenagers and college kids, and on Saturdays little kids came for my mother's Story Circle. This was the only day someone other than Isaac brewed the coffee, the task falling to my dad to provide the mothers with free cups.

But on Sundays my favorite customer came by. Tyler was a four year old little boy who had been born blind. When Tyler first started coming to the bookstore it was to the regular Story Circle. Little kids are brutal, though, and weren't all that willing to play with Tyler. A few of them even complained that Tyler's unfocused light eyes scared them.

So instead Tyler started coming on Sundays to a special Story Circle with just me and him. We would sit in my favorite window seat so we could feel the warm sunshine. I ordered him special books with raised print or textured pictures. I always gave him the books afterward; I never made his mom pay.

I had Tyler tucked into my lap with his finger tracing the raised text while I read.

"Gwen?" he asked. "What does a dinosaur look like?" He asked these questions all the time when we were reading, so I started bringing toys, bits of fabric, rocks—anything he could take into his hands.

"Like this," I said, pressing a dinosaur figurine into his hand. "They had scales like a lizard," I traced his finger over its back. "And long, sharp teeth."

I had no idea we had an audience until we had finished the book and Tyler had gone running to the front to find his mom. It always amazed me that he could traverse the bookstore so well without seeing any of it.

"Oh, hey!" I said when I noticed Spencer perusing a bookshelf. He looked like he was trying to play casual.

"I didn't want to interrupt," he said. I was still sitting in the window sill so I waved him over. "Did you get a chance to read the book my mom sent?"

"Yeah, it was good. I can't believe it's not part of the lit class I'm taking right now." What I didn't tell him was that I thought it was kind of sweet in a way that even in Diana's shaky writings during schizophrenic breaks she worried about keeping him safe.

"That little boy was blind?" I followed Spencer's gaze to Tyler, who was performing some handshake he and Isaac had made up. You never would have known he was blind by the way he mirrored Isaac's movements and always met Isaac's hand with his perfectly.

"Since birth."

"Did you know some people are able to develop a kind of echolocation despite their blindness? They can use finger snaps or some other noise source to judge the place of objects in a room."

I couldn't help smiling. Talking to Spencer was like talking to a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards, only much better since Spencer was an actual person. A very good-looking person at that.

"Like Daredevil," I said, remembering the comic books Eric loved and begged me to read to him before he learned.

"Who?" Spencer asked, looking so adorably confused that a laugh escaped.

"A superhero, silly."

Spencer's days off were sporadic to say the least. There was no telling how long a case would last, but when there wasn't a case to work (which was frighteningly scarce), his job seemed like a regular 9 to 5 set-up. Lucky for me the bookstore didn't close until 7 and as the person living above it, I was almost always the closer. Which is how Spencer came to be spending many an evening or afternoon visiting the store.

The more Spencer stopped by, the more Isaac took note of it.

"So are you going to sleep with the Boy Wonder or are you two just going to do this flirtation dance for all of time? Because I know you girls think that's romantic and crap, but let me tell you, sex is better."

"You talk some pretty big game, Mr. Monogamy." To tell the truth, Isaac was pretty much my only friend. I wasn't much of a social butterfly. Most of my high school friends had been school friends. You know, the ones that you sit with at lunch or partner up with in class but don't hang out with off school grounds? College had pretty much been the same. It was only three months in, but I didn't expect to have many more friends than Isaac and I was okay with that.

I was curious, though, when and if Spencer would ask me out. Not that I didn't like playing chess with him even though he always beat me in a handful of moves and chatting in my window seat, but I was hopeful it would be something more. I definitely liked Spencer. He was cute and smart and he didn't think I was a freak or a ticking time bomb because Maggie was schizophrenic. To me, he was all I could ever ask for, really.

But for a few months, all we really did was play chess. I had never played before Spencer taught me.

"I don't know why I keep playing with you," I said one day in late November. I flicked my own queen over on the board—it was obvious Spencer would be able to take me out in his next move. "You always beat me."

"You're not bad at all, actually. I play with my coworker on the plane rides so I get a lot more practice than you do." I'm sure we both knew he was being generous about my chess skills. I pulled on my sleeves so I could wrap them over my hands. I get cold easy, and when the weather had first turned Spencer actually asked me if my iron levels were okay because apparently sensitivity to cold is an iron deficiency symptom.

"Maybe one day, like when hell freezes over, I'll beat you."

I really liked hanging out with Spencer. It was fun and comfortable and Spencer was good company. But as November faded into December I started worrying that maybe all we had was a friendship.

But then, two weeks before Christmas, Spencer seemed very nervous during one of our chess playing sessions. I had noticed he hadn't put any sugar in his coffee, or touched it at all for that matter. He usually rips open _at least _7 packs to pour into it.

"You okay?" I asked, twirling my candy cane in my hot chocolate and examining the chess board. Since Spencer had been playing distractedly, I actually had a decent chance of winning if I played carefully.

"I…I was thinking," Spencer said nervously just as I had picked up one of my knights. I peeked up at him through my bangs.

"We always hang out here…I mean, that's okay, I like coming here to see you. But I was thinking maybe we could go somewhere else some time." He said it all in a great, big rush of breath as a smile spread across my face.

"Like a date?" I asked, putting my knight down without even looking at the board.

"No! I mean, well, yes. If, if you want it to be." The question had turned his face entirely red. I laughed a little, I just couldn't help it.

"A date with you would be great, Spencer," I said, smiling and feeling my own face get some color in it.

"Okay," was all that Spencer said, but he looked the most happy and excited I have ever seen him. His smile only grew when he glanced down at the chess board and moved one of his knights.

"Checkmate, Gwen." I looked down at the board, surprised. He had me beat, and I was so sure I was going to win.

"You did that on purpose," I muttered, moving my pieces back to their starting positions. I could still feel Spencer's smile directed towards me even with my head down.


	5. Entry Five

_Author's Note: I did not know (I live VERY far from Virginia!) that Quantico is actually a very small town. For the sake of trying to keep my writing accurate to whichever fandom it is written for, as well as being realistic in terms of settings, I did some research on Virginia towns and have decided to move Gwen's place of living from Quantico to Montclair, VA. I have updated chapter 2 of this story with this change and it will continue from this chapter on. Sorry for this change! Read on :)_

* * *

I didn't know until our first date that Spencer actually lived in Quantico. Most of the town was dedicated to the military base and the Bureau, so a lot of people who worked at either one lived outside of Quantico and commuted. I lived in Montclair at the time, which is a little over 20 minutes outside of Quantico. But I didn't know that until our first date.

"You live _in _Quantico?" I asked before taking a sip of the spiced hot cider we were sharing. They were sold in big tin cups at the Winter Festival Montclair held every year. I was the one who picked the location of our date.

"Where else would I live? I work for the Bureau and the Bureau is in Quantico. It just made sense." The cold was making Spencer's ear and the tip of his nose pink. I had told him it would be cold and a hat wouldn't be a bad idea, but his head was bare, with snowflakes dotting his hair. He didn't wear gloves, just a coat with a purple scarf peeking out of the top of it.

"Yeah, I guess it does. But I live in Montclair and that's twenty minutes from Quantico. So you've been driving twenty minutes pretty regularly to come to the bookstore to see me?"

This question brought color to Spencer's cheeks where it hadn't been before. "Yes."

The blush in his cheeks and the way he ducked his head to try to hide it brought a swell of happiness up through my chest, putting a smile on my face and giving me the bravery to slip my gloved hand into his pocket where he was keeping his so I could hold his hand.

It surprised him enough to make him start a little and turn his gaze towards me.

"Is this okay?" I asked, suddenly unsure of myself. But Spencer just smiled and nodded. He seemed nervous, and it seemed that he didn't talk much when he was nervous. Not that Spencer talked much anyway—he was very quiet, but then again I wasn't exactly the chattiest.

The Winter Festival is one of my favorite things in the whole world. I usually would have dragged Isaac or Eric to the festival with me, but both were spared that year thanks to Spencer.

I loved the twinkle lights and all the snow and the warm baked goods and the music they played. It wasn't Christmas music—it was instrumental pieces with pianos and violins and flutes that somehow just entirely said _winter_. But my favorite thing, the thing that kept me coming back year after year and that I was dragging Spencer along for was the ice skating show on Lake Montclair.

"Oh, it's about to start," I said, pulling Spencer forward by our linked hands, which were still in his pocket. "This is my favorite part."

Usually you see ice skating routines as pairs, but during the Winter Festival there was usually a dozen skaters on Lake Montclair. They would perform beautiful, dizzying routines full of leaps and twirls and alternating partners.

In my excitement, I felt myself come up onto my tiptoes to try to see better. I think I got so caught up in watching it that I nearly forgot Spencer was there. That is until halfway through the show, when I felt Spencer thread his fingers through mine inside his pocket, filling me with a different kind of excitement. I gave his hand a squeeze and smiled up at him.

The show was always held at sundown, as a kind of finale for the festival. Halfway through it, I could feel Spencer shivering.

"You're cold, aren't you?" I whispered. "I told you to dress warmer."

"I'm fine," he said, but I could hear his teeth chatter.

"Come with me." I pulled my hand from his in favor of slipping it into the crook of his elbow, so I could pull him through the crowd.

"No, it's okay," Spencer tried to protest. "You wanted to see this, didn't you?"

"Not if you're going to freeze! Now come on, you're making a scene," I teased with a wink.

"I'm not causing a scene!" Spencer whisper-shouted, the color again rising to his face and making me giggle.

I led Spencer through the crowds and onto the sidewalk. Spencer was cold and I was hungry. Other than treats, the festival didn't have food. Once we were away from everyone, I took Spencer's hand again.

"I know a place you'll like." There was a little café in Montclair situated on the corner where two streets met. It was very appropriately named _Cornerstone _and they had a fireplace with stacks of board games and amazingly good food.

I went there often enough that the owners, a sweet older couple who were almost always there, would start making me a French dip sandwich with no onions as soon as I walked into the door.

But on that day when I walked in with Spencer in tow, Stewart, one half of the couple who owned _Cornerstone_ exclaimed, "You've brought a friend!"

I smiled sheepishly as I pulled off my gloves and jacket. "I have those sometimes."

"She tells lies. Gweny never brings anyone in. She always comes alone and sticks her nose in a book. You, you're special."

I left Spencer to order something to eat; Stewart already knew what I wanted. While Spencer was ordering, I went over to the stacks of games that were beside the roaring fire place and pulled out a pack of playing cards. The café was more or less empty, with most of the town at the Winter Festival.

"We're going to play a game I actually have a chance of winning." I broke the deck in half to shuffle them.

"I know how to play black jack and poker. It's really quite simple if you use the right mathematical equations."

"Oh, but we're not playing those games. We're playing speed." The whole point of speed is to be faster than your opponent, as the name suggests. I knew that Spencer would beat me at anything that had to do with intelligence. I'd like to think I'm fairly intelligent, but there's just no besting Spencer Reid in a competition of wits.

But speed was more of a game of luck and agility, at least hand-eye coordination wise, so I thought I'd give it a go. I divvied up the deck and explained the rules to Spencer.

"This game gets intense. I hope you're prepared."

Spencer would tell you that it was something akin to home field advantage that caused me to win every single round of speed we played that night. I'll tell you that's just Spencer's pride talking, unhappy that he had been beaten at something so simple as the game of speed. We must have played for a handful of hours while we ate, because Spencer was bound and determined he would beat me. He never did.

"Have you accepted defeat?" I asked when Spencer took up the cards and made them into one deck again. I was warmed by the fire and from laughing with Spencer. I had been on dates before, but never one where it just felt like comfortable fun with someone you liked.

"Obviously you haven't looked at the time," Spencer smirked, pointing at the clock situated behind my head. I hadn't noticed that Stewart and his wife had started cleaning up around the restaurant. The clock was approaching nine.

"I didn't even realize," I said, laughing. Spencer helped me into my coat and I once again pulled my hat down over my ears while Spencer wound his scarf around his neck. I felt filled up with happiness.

It had begun snowing heavier, big soft flakes that floated down to the ground gently. I could feel them lighting on my face. Spencer took my hand and placed it in his pocket again with his own. I had insisted we walk to the festival due to how crowded the parking always was, so we were having to walk back to my apartment over the bookstore.

"Do you ever get scared? I mean, with the work you do. Does it make doing things like this, walking around at night, scary?" I asked, tipping my head back to look up at him. The street lights were catching the soft brown of his eyes.

"No," he said. "I know it probably seems like serial killers are a dime a dozen with the workload I have, but being murdered is actually a relatively rare occurrence. But that's not why I'm not scared of it. You still have some kind of control when you're attacked in any way. There are worst things in this world that you can't control."

I knew he was talking about schizophrenia. I leaned into him a bit.

"Women are more likely to develop it," I said. "But I'm sure you already knew that."

"I also know it skips generations. It can lie dormant for years, decades even. I read the statistics all the time, but…it just doesn't make me feel any better."

I knew exactly where he was coming from. I had been feeling that way for most of my life, since I was old enough to realize that not all kids had regular MRIs and psychological health checkups.

"At least," I say, trying for a joke, "if worst comes to worst, we'll have friends at Bennington."

To my surprise, I actually do get a laugh out of him. "I've never looked at it that way."

"Gotta find the positives in life, Spence. It makes it a lot easier to get through."

Despite the cold, the walk was nice. The snow was falling gently and Spencer's cheeks were pink with the cold but his hand was warm around mine.

When we got back to the bookstore, I brought Spencer around to the back. Isaac had locked up for me. It was a pain to ever go through the front when I didn't have too—there were so many locks to deal with and a ton of alarms to disable. More often than not, I just used the fire escape stairs in the back.

I led him up all of the metal stairs, and I was happy he didn't give me any kind of statistics about how dangerous it was. I often thought that the fire escape looked like a scene from a slasher movie; I didn't need someone who solved serial killer crimes to tell me I was right.

The cause of Spencer's silence was soon made obvious. He was nervous again, looking just like he did before he asked me on the date. I caught on to what he was thinking and turned my face upward.

Spencer looked even more nervous this time than he was the day he asked me on the date.

"Um… is this okay?" He asked, echoing my earlier question.

"Yes," I stretched up on my tiptoes to meet him halfway. It seemed to have the calming effect I was hoping for; I could feel Spencer's hands on my back pulling me in closer and his lips were soft on mine.


	6. Entry Six

"I was watching this documentary on childhood onset schizophrenia," I began to tell Isaac. We were walking across the quad to class, both of us bundled up. With a few more dates with Spencer, the rest of the Christmas break had flown by.

"As one does," Isaac teased. He was checking his phone for what must have been the twentieth time that day. Ever since he met some guy he swore was better than Derek Morgan at a club, he had been checking his phone to see if he had any messages from him.

"Oh, hush, it reminded me of _my _childhood."

Isaac burst out laughing. "I love conversations with you. Where else am I going to hear shit like this? Forget this psychology degree, you should be a comedian."

"Have you heard from that guy yet?" I asked.

"No. If he _is _interested, he's taking this 'wait a few days to call' thing a little too seriously. Tell me about your beau," Isaac said, punctuating his sentence with a hip bump that almost made me knock into a random professor.

I felt my face heat up, both because I nearly took out one of the faculty and also at Isaac's question.

"What's to tell?" I asked. "We go on dates."

"When your face starts matching your hair, don't think I don't _know _there isn't more to tell, Gwen Harper! I'll get you to crack one of these days."

I gave him a shove towards the doorway of the lecture hall that held his class before bounding up the stairs to mine.

Things were going pretty great with Spencer. Not up to Isaac's preferred speed, but that's neither here nor there. Due to the hectic work schedule Spencer kept (I don't care what he said about serial killers being relatively rare, he was gone a whole lot for something so 'rare'), I didn't get to see him as often as I liked.

"Hotch and Gideon try to give us time off as often as they can. It's complicated, though. We can't all be on vacation at the same time, so we're on this weird sliding schedule for time off." Spencer had tried to explain to me.

I was apparently important enough to receive text messages when Spencer had to go away on assignment. I had to teach him how to text, though—he didn't much like technology. I had gotten a text that morning saying that they were heading to Oregon.

The schedule we had going was pretty near perfect. As a psychology major, I had plenty of studying and homework to do, and Spencer's work schedule left wide open time for that. When we were able to make plans, there were hardly any conflicts. It also left me with plenty of time to spend with Isaac, so he couldn't accuse me of being one of those girls that drop their friends as soon as they have some romance in their life.

Isaac and I had 'big' plans that night, or at least that's how Isaac described them. Hair dyeing was on our agenda, and Isaac was ecstatic that I was finally going to let him touch my virgin hair as he called it, even if it was just for a streak.

This is going to sound wonky, but I swear it is true: One of the nurses, a guy in his mid-thirties named Thomas, swore up and down that since Maggie and I were identical twins, we would one day try to swap places. This idea of his started when we were seventeen and hadn't let up. It got to the point where he would demand I prove I was Gwen, back when Maggie and I had similar haircuts. That's when I had started bobbing my hair, because I knew Maggie preferred hers long and I didn't really care.

The problem was, in one of her recent lapses, Maggie had hacked off a lot of her hair, resulting in one of the nurses having to cut Maggie's hair. The resulting style wasn't _exactly _like mine, especially since I had started growing mine out a bit, but it was similar enough that Thomas had started his theories again.

I don't even know how Maggie got scissors to do the job—anything weapon-like is not supposed to be allowed in patient's personal rooms.

"You really only want a streak?" Isaac had asked. "One little streak?"

"Well, not a _little_ one. I want it to look intentional. I want to put it right here," I sectioned out the piece, near the right side of my hair.

"We can do that," Isaac agreed. "But it's gonna look punk, and despite your penchant for Fall Out Boy and Paramore, you are _so _not punk."

I doubted that. My hair had grown a little, no longer bobbed to my chin, but it wasn't quite shoulder length, and I still had straight across bangs. Isaac dyed his hair all the time, running the gamut from natural shades to neons to pastels. I trusted him to bleach and dye a chunk of my hair without turning it weirdly orange or something.

The end result of Isaac's dye job _was _a little reminiscent of Hayley Williams, but I'm pretty sure he did that on purpose. I liked it, though. The nearly platinum shade Isaac had chosen worked surprisingly well with my auburn hair.

"I like it," Maggie had said. "Makes you look more like a college student and less like someone who has been an adult since they were five."

"Oh, thanks!" I said, laughing. "Now there's no way Thomas can try to accuse us of switching places."

By the time Spencer got back from Oregon, the newness of the blonde streak had worn off on me and just about everyone else. I had all but forgot about it by the time I had the chance to see Spencer again.

"You know, you really need a better front door," Spencer barely got out when I had opened the door to my apartment, because I had bounded up on my tip toes to kiss him.

"You don't like the three sets of fire escape stairs and five locks on my door?" It was a bit of a pain to deal with, but it actually made me feel pretty safe. Never had anyone, to my knowledge at least, tried to get in through there. All the good stuff would be in the actual store part of the building.

"When did you do this?" Spencer asked, reaching his hand out to play with the blonde streak.

"While you were in Oregon," I said. "Do you like it?" I wasn't worried about what Spencer would think about it until that moment.

"Yeah, I do actually. It looks really good."

I'm sure you'll think we're boring, but it didn't take Spencer and I long to mostly shuck the going on dates in public places thing in favor of one or the other's apartment. We were so good at being a young couple, I know. I don't mean we didn't still go out and do things, just that we quickly got to the comfortable stage where we could watch movies and eat take out and still be happy about it.

I grimaced when I saw the design on the takeout bag Spencer had in his hand. Spencer liked all sorts of international foods, and that day he had brought Indian. I was _not _looking forward to eating it.

"Look, Schroder, your favorite person is here," I called out to my cat. My parents had given me Schroder as a graduation present. He was such a tiny gray thing when I first got him, but he grew into a big, strong cat with fur so thick that I had to comb it pretty often. Schroder absolutely adored Spencer.

"Did you know that the old wives tale about cats stealing babies' breath is based on cats checking to see if a baby is breathing? If it's not, a cat will just go ahead and eat it. They'll eat adults, too. If you were to die and no one found you for a while, Schroder would scavenge your body."

"Don't tell me awful lies about my sweet baby," I said, picking Schroder up before he could make it to Spencer. "No, Schrody, don't be his friend tonight. He's spreading rumors about you." There was no pleasing Schroder until he could get himself to Spencer, though. He wriggled out of my arms and immediately sat on top of Spencer's feet, meowing the whole time.

It was mid-February by that point. Not exactly the time of the year when you should expect a thunderstorm in Virginia. But while we were sitting on my couch watching TV, Spencer very enthusiastically eating the Indian food while I picked at it, there came a huge crash of thunder that made both of us jump.

"Whoever heard of thunder during a snow storm?" I grumbled, looking towards my window. It wasn't just snow anymore, though. It was sleet, heavy and brutal. You could hear the ice and water slapping against the glass.

"Lightning snow storms are rare, but they do happen when weather conditions are right."

The TV started blaring, as if to agree with what Spencer said. A robotic voice started spitting out weather warnings and advisories, as well as which roads were being shut down for safety until the storm passed. Wouldn't you know, one of the roads being closed down was the one that Spencer used to get to Quantico.

"Uh-oh," I said. Spencer looked extremely nervous, like he had no idea what he should do. If you were to ask Isaac, he would say that I should have had sex with Spencer by the third date, but in actuality neither of us had made the move to stay the night at the other's apartment as of yet.

"You can stay here, you know. I mean, if you want." I said, blushing before the words are even out of my mouth. They cause a similar blush to rise in Spencer's cheeks.

"I mean," I continue, fumbling over my words, "it doesn't seem like this storm is going to end any time soon. It would be dangerous to try to go anywhere, and the road to Quantico has been shut down anyway. It just makes sense."

"O-okay," Spencer said with a shy, nervous smile. Even though we were both adults at 19 and 22, it felt clandestine. It was a new step in our relationship after all.

Since it was a surprise, Spencer didn't have any clothes for tomorrow. Or anything to change into to sleep in. Spencer struck me as the kind of guy who wore pajamas; I just couldn't see him going to bed in his underwear or even shirtless. Lucky for him, I had stolen a few of my dad's shirts and sweatpants. It's just really great and comfy to sleep in super baggy things sometimes, especially in Virginia winters.

I went into my bedroom and grabbed a t-shirt and sweatpants for Spencer. I was sure they would be baggy on him, too, as my dad had what he liked to call a 'Santa belly', but they would do. Since I was in my room anyway, I went ahead and changed into some flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt.

"Here," I handed Spencer the clothing. Schroder had abandoned his perch beside Spencer in favor of hiding under the recliner, something he did every time it stormed.

It was still pretty early on in the night, and I didn't know how to broach the subject of sleeping arrangements anyway, so I took the comforter off of my bed and brought it over to the couch. It was getting cold, and if I was going to sit through one of the insanely long foreign films Spencer loved while he had to translate for me, I wanted to be comfortable.

"You play guitar?" Spencer asked when he had come back. I was right, my dad's clothes were pretty baggy on him. My only bathroom was through my bedroom, so Spencer had seen my guitar in its stand in the corner.

"Yeah, and piano. My parents made all of us learn piano. Me and Eric decided to learn guitar, too. But Maggie can learn to play just about anything you give her."

"Piano, too?" Spencer seemed more interested in that than the guitar.

"Yeah, I'll show you. C'mon," I led him through the door that connects my apartment to the store downstairs, having to stop regularly to disable alarms and undo locks. I took Spencer down to the piano we had in the store, flicking on a few of the lights.

I pulled a chair from one of the tables for Spencer to sit on and took a seat on the piano bench. I ran some scales to warm up before I began to play. It was Bach's Little Fugue, my favorite piece to play on the piano. It's a short piece, but it's beautiful.

"Bach," Spencer said with a big smile when I'd finished. "I didn't know you listened to classic music."

"I'm full of surprises," I said with a wink. An especially strong gust of wind smacked ice loudly against the shop's front windows.

"Let's get back upstairs before Schroder has a heart attack."

After making sure Schroder was still happy under the arm chair, I made us some hot chocolate while Spencer put on the movie he had watched. All these foreign films Spencer loved were several hours long, and they never had subtitles. Like I said, that meant Spencer had to translate for me. Which I didn't mind at all.

I handed Spencer his mug and settled into the couch with him, leaning against him. You see, when Spencer had to translate these movies for me, he would whisper the lines in my ear. He always did it so reverently it pulled me into the movie more than the actual plot did.

It was warm in my apartment, under the comforter and cuddle up to Spencer and with the hot chocolate warming me from the middle outward. It wasn't even all that late, but I started getting sleepy very soon. I don't think it took more than half an hour for me to fall into sleep.

When I woke up, it was quiet. Well, except for the ringing cell phone. The room was still dark; it wasn't even dawn yet. I was tucked under Spencer's arm, my head on his chest, our legs tangled together. I pushed my hair off my face as I sat up a little. I didn't recognize the ringtone, so I knew it must be Spencer's.

"Spence," I said, trying to shake his shoulder. "Hey, wake up. Your phone is ringing."

That seemed to get his attention and he bolted up so quickly I almost fell off the couch as he worked himself out from under me and the blankets.

"Gideon?" He asked. "Hello?" I couldn't hear anything coming from the other line, but Spencer started walking around the apartment looking for his shoes.

"Arizona? Yeah, yeah. When do we leave? Immediately? Okay, uh, I just need to get dressed. Yes, sir. Okay. See you soon."

Spencer found his shoes and rushed into my bedroom, where he'd left his clothes. He got dressed really quickly. I know because his shirt was buttoned up wrong.

"Hey, slow down Speed Racer." I said, catching his arm as he walked by. "Let me help you." I re-buttoned his shirt for him and tied his tie.

"I'm sorry, I have to hurry. I can't be late."

"You won't be. You're the only one that lives in Quantico, right? You'll get there way before the rest of the team."

That didn't do a lot to calm him, though. He still sped around, gathering his stuff while I watched in amusement from the couch. I wrapped myself up in my comforter and walked with him to the door.

"Okay, I have to go," he said, leaning down to kiss me quickly. He was out the door almost before the kiss was over.

This was my first taste of being left behind.


	7. Entry Seven

"It's our resident genius!" I could barely hear Isaac over the sound of mine and Eric's guitars. I glanced up to see that Spencer had just walked through the door and I smiled over at him. We were learning to play 'Fast Car' by Tracy Chapman—both of our parent's favorite song. We had plans to record it for their anniversary.

I had already recorded Maggie's part. We had to give her the smaller part, because it would be too hard getting us all together at Bennington and finding a quiet enough place to record it in full all at once. Maggie didn't mind, though, and she was fine with doing the rhythm part, which ended up being maracas, while Eric and I did the guitar work and the singing.

"Just ignore the Harper siblings over there. Sometimes they do this obnoxious thing where they get together and flaunt their musical prowess." I looked up in time to see Eric flip Isaac off and kicked him.

"Hey!" Eric protested, but I glared at him. "You're fourteen, don't do that."

"I'll be fifteen next week," Eric protested.

"That's not much better!" Our arguing had interrupted the song anyway, so I slid my guitar strap over my head. "Let's take a break."

"Why, so you can go make out with your boyfriiiiend?" Eric said in a singsong. I smacked him on the head. I leaned my guitar against the table we were sitting at and went over to Spencer.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him after giving him a 'hello' kiss. It was a Tuesday, definitely not one of his days off, and it seemed early for him to be done with work.

"The boss let us off early for once," Spencer said with a smile.

"Well that's always a nice surprise. Especially with your line of work."

"Yeah, but, um, there's another surprise." He looked nervous. He kept tugging on the sleeves of his sweater.

"And what's that?" I asked.

But Spencer didn't really have any time to answer.

A pretty blonde lady with vintage-looking glasses and a _really _colorful outfit comes all but bursting through the front door of the bookstore. She came right up to Spencer and started scolding him for not waiting for her.

"Hi!" I said, surprised.

"Gwen, this is, uh, Penelope Garcia. She's our tech analyst and she… well, she really wanted to meet you. If that's okay," Spencer said.

"Well, it's only fair considering how often you have to be subjected to Isaac," I said, standing up to great Penelope. I tried to offer my hand, but she pulled me into a hug instead.

"Excuse you!" Isaac called over from his coffee counter. He had Eric over there, feeding him chocolate éclairs. "I have a new favorite Harper child, and his name is Eric. You've been demoted."

I rolled my eyes at Isaac and laughed at him, even though he insisted he was serious.

"It's so nice to meet the girl our little Reid is always texting!" Penelope said excitedly. _Excited_ is really the only way to describe Penelope Garcia. Bouncy, smiling, colorful—Penelope embodies everything that the word brings to mind.

"I love your hair!" Penelope all but gushes, reaching forward to touch the platinum piece Isaac had put in.

"Seriously, I'm going to start charging you for each compliment you get on that hair," Isaac had left the counter and extended his hand to Penelope. "I'm Gwen's best friend and the creator of her hairstyle. I'm also hopelessly in love with your coworker, Derek Morgan."

Penelope took his hand and said, "We're all in love with Derek Morgan. Anyone who says otherwise is a dirty, dirty liar."

"Garcia wanted to go to lunch with us, since we got off work so early."

"Yeah, we can do that," I said and took Spencer's hand to try to ease his nerves.

I told Eric he could go upstairs to my apartment and hang out while we were gone if he wanted, as long as he didn't eat all of my food. Eric ate amazing amounts of food, but he was still so lanky. Teenage boys are truly a scientific marvel.

"Reid told us you work in a bookstore. That's _so _Spencer! My sweet cheeks says Spencer reads at least three books at a time on flights." After that little exchange with Isaac, it was easy to figure out that her 'sweet cheeks' was none other than Derek Morgan.

"Yeah," I told Penelope, "it's my parents' store. I just help out with it. My little brother will too, when he's actually old enough that we don't break child labor laws." Which meant next week, because Eric had been begging to be allowed to help out for pay since he was thirteen. Our parents conceded that he could start at fifteen, which was a year earlier than I started to help out.

It was spring break, so Eric had been helping out a lot for free—something he made sure to remind us of nearly daily.

I told Dad, who was in the back and in on our anniversary present for him and Mom, that I was leaving for lunch. I took Spencer and Penelope to a little restaurant just down the street from the bookstore.

Lunch with Penelope was fun, probably because she was so happy and talkative. I had met Derek briefly before, and I had seen Aaron Hotchner and Jennifer Jareau, but Penelope was the first of Spencer's team members that I really spent any time with.

But Penelope is full of stories as colorful as her wardrobe.

"If it weren't for the fact that I am an excellent hacker, I wouldn't even be in the FBI," Penelope told me over mozzarella sticks. "Has Reid ever told you about that?"

I thought it was really funny that Penelope kept calling Spencer by his last name. I guess it was an FBI thing, because all the times I'd heard Spencer on the phone with his coworkers he had called them by their last names, except for Jennifer Jareau, who he called JJ.

"No," I said, and this was all the prompting Penelope needed to launch into the story.

"I was really underground—it was _so _cool. But I got too cocky, and let me tell you, that is the downfall of all hackers. You can't ever think you're too good to get caught, because that's when you get caught. My saving grace was that I am so utterly amazing the U.S. government couldn't help but offer me a job."

Penelope kept me laughing, and I think she liked me too. Spencer started to relax after a little while.

"I wasn't sure how that would go," Spencer told me as he walked me back to the bookstore. "Garcia can be a lot sometimes."

"No, I like her," I told Spencer with a smile. "I'm sure I'd like all your friends."

Spencer had paperwork to do, and I had homework, so he was going to be heading back to Quantico. We had plans that weekend to go to DC, because Spencer had never been despite living in Virginia for about a year at that point. I knew he'd love the area.

* * *

I had been right about DC. Spencer absolutely fell in love with it. It had been a good week. Spencer hadn't been called out for work, Penelope had been nice, Eric and I had finished the song, and DC had been a ton of fun. I had every reason to be riding high.

Until Sunday when I visited Maggie, that is.

It was not as often as it used to be that Maggie had truly awful days. Her doctors had finally found a combination of medications that seemed to help keep her schizophrenia at bay. But that didn't ever mean the schizophrenia couldn't come crashing down with full force.

"I don't think you want to go in there today, darlin'," one of my favorite nurses, Vera, said as she stopped me on my way to Maggie's room. "It's been a real bad day for your sister."

You know that yelling you hear in exorcism movies? When it's supposed to be the devil or a demon or what have you? Well, let me tell you, it's not demonic possession those sounds are based off of—a whole slew of 'possessed' people were schizophrenics.

It is these sounds that I could hear coming from Maggie's room. I didn't need to go any closer than that. I could feel the color drain from my face.

"I think you're right," I told Vera.

I had not, in recent years, seen Maggie at her absolute worse. Like I said, whatever drug combination they had figured out was working wonders for her. But I had seen her at her worst before:

The day she cut her own leg open, blood spilling across the bathroom floor.

The day she tore down most of the wallpaper in our house with the strength no eight year old should have, entirely convinced there were monsters hiding underneath.

The day she tried to smother Eric, little bruises blooming on his baby face where she had held the pillow down.

The first bad day in Bennington, where she had knocked holes in the walls of her room and had hit me so hard that I fell back and smacked my head on the desk, cutting my head open and needing stitches.

I didn't need to see her at her worst, because I had a whole catalog of those days in my head.

I turned on my heel and went right back the way I had come, leaving Bennington. I didn't even stop to tell Diana 'hello' and chat with her about Spencer like I usually did. I was shaking too bad to drive, so I just sat in my car and leaned my head against the steering wheel.

Seeing Maggie on her bad days was hard for our whole family. But that was multiplied a hundred fold for me, her twin, because when I saw Maggie on her bad days, I wasn't just seeing my sister.


	8. Entry Eight

"Shouldn't you be doing homework?" Spencer asked when I abandoned my homework, which I had been doing in his tiny kitchen, in favor of bothering him in the living room. Spending the night at one or the other's place had become a more common occurrence—as common as it could be with Spencer's work schedule.

"Why should I?" I asked, forcing him to lift his arm so I could fit myself under there. He was sitting on his couch, reading a book in that crazy-fast way he does where he can read the whole page in a matter of seconds.

"I told you that teacher hates me. I'll fail either way."

"Nobody could hate you," Spencer said, giving up and resting his chin on top of my head so he could keep reading while I basically used him as a pillow.

"This woman does. I know for sure. Wanna know how I know?" I asked, twisting one of his curls around my finger. He needed a haircut.

"How do you know?"

"I wrote Isaac's last paper. Plagiarism, I know, so don't lecture me. It was for science. We did a little experiment, see, and I wrote both of our papers. He got an A. I got a D."

Mine and Isaac's professor really _did _hate me. It was a required undergraduate credit, a research class, and she was the only professor who taught it. I was stuck with her, unfortunately. She failed pretty me on pretty much every assignment I turned in.

"She's Umbridge and I'm Harry," I added, to which Spencer chuckled.

"You must really hate her if you compare her to Umbridge."

"Believe me, the feeling is mutual. You, a certifiable genius, could write a paper and she'd still fail it just because my name was on it."

"I think you're being dramatic," Spencer said, while I watched his warm brown eyes flick over the words on the pages. I love Spencer's eyes. There's something about them that is cozy and inviting.

"Whatever, at least I know how to cook spaghetti," I said, untangling myself from him at the sound of the kitchen timer. Spencer hadn't known how to tell when spaghetti noodles were done. Actually, Spencer didn't know how to cook much. It was amazing he was so thin with all the takeout food he ate. His diet was the model of bachelorhood.

"That's rude!" Spencer called to me, but I didn't pay him any mind and went to straining the spaghetti noodles instead. I was one hundred percent sure that the only time Spencer ate home cooked food was when I stayed over or the nice old lady who lived next door took pity on him.

"Your mother told me to tell you that you are long overdue for a visit, by the way!" I called from the kitchen. I made Spencer a plate first and filled up a glass of water for him before carrying it out to him in the living room.

"She knows I get busy," Spencer said, blushing when I set the food down in front of him and leaned over to give him a kiss on the cheek. "You know you don't have to do that."

"I like to do it," I told him. "And your mom says if you aren't too busy for your girlfriend, then you can't be too busy for her, either."

I watched as Spencer blushed again at the word 'girlfriend'. It was really cute, how shy he still was about the whole thing. We had been dating for a few months by then. He was getting more confident in our relationship, though.

"How's your sister doing?" Spencer changed the subject on me. The honest answer was that she wasn't doing too great. This happened sometimes, her body would get used to the cocktail of medications or she just wouldn't be strong enough to fight with the schizophrenia. In the past two months, I'd only been able to see her once. Every other time I went, I just chatted with Spencer's mother.

"She's about the same, I guess," I called to him from the kitchen. Diana's schizophrenia manifested in a different way than Maggie's. While Spencer's mother was highly paranoid and prone to becoming intensely suspicious of the simplest actions, she didn't fall into the dark places of self-harm and delusions that my sister did.

Spencer had told me once that despite the schizophrenia, his mother had never tried to harm him, even if it did cause her to forget to care for herself. He always knew there was something wrong with his mother, he had told me, but he was never mistreated during his childhood.

"You still haven't been able to see her?" Spencer asked once I was back in the living room.

"No," I said, and he nodded. This is one of the things I loved about Spencer even that early on. He didn't pry about it, because he knew where I stood. He was standing in the same place, feeling the same risk of developing schizophrenia himself.

"I wish I were as old as you," I told him, twirling some spaghetti around my fork. "You're already almost twenty-four. You're closer to being out of the woods."

We both knew, very well, that most people who are going to be schizophrenic develop it by their mid-twenties.

"But am I closer to being out of the woods or am I closer to being schizophrenic? There's no way for anyone to know."

"Touché."

Talking about schizophrenia with Spencer was easy. Much easier than talking about it with the therapist my parents used to make me see in high school. She tried, but she just didn't get it. Spencer did.

Something that always seemed to happen when Maggie was doing bad was that I suddenly became an insomniac. I knew why—I always had nightmares about myself becoming schizophrenic when she wasn't doing too well.

The insomnia was fine when I was home. It meant that Schroder got a few extra hours of me playing with him, and I lived alone so it wasn't like there was anyone for me to accidentally wake up.

But staying at Spencer's posed a problem. I couldn't sleep, but I didn't want to wake him up. I didn't have class on Fridays, but he certainly had work, and in his line of work he couldn't afford to be exhausted.

I was very comfortable where I was, with Spencer's arm thrown across me in his sleep, but I was also bored and I knew I didn't have a chance in hell of actually going falling asleep. So as carefully as I could, I slid out from under the weight of his arm and walked quietly into his living room. Or at least I hoped I was being quiet.

I loved Spencer's living room in his Quantico apartment, mainly because I thought it was adorable that it was too small for all the books he had. There were two bookshelves in there that were about as tall as Spencer, and Spencer is not short by any means. Even those two bookshelves couldn't contain them all; there were tall stacks along the wall in all the space not taken up by the bookshelves.

It was amazing that anyone could read all those books in nearly twenty-four years of life. I knew Spencer had not only read them all, but could probably recite them word for word thanks to that eidetic memory of his.

I turned on a lamp so I could have a little light, but not enough to accidentally wake Spencer, so I could look through the stacks. I did this every time I came over, and I still hadn't gotten through looking at all of the books he had. There were even more in his bedroom, too, so even if I did get through all of the books in the living room, that wouldn't be the end of it.

They were also in alphabetical order. I had ended in the G's the last time I had sat down to look through them, so that's where I started.

I made it into the J's before I heard Spencer behind me.

"You know, I can't sleep either sometimes. Insomnia is pretty common for people under a lot of stress." He was speaking quietly, but it still made me jump. I turned my head to see him standing in the doorway of the kitchen, two mugs in his hands.

"Oh, is it?" I asked, accepting the mug of tea he offered me. When I took a drink, I could feel the sugar in between my teeth and it made me smile. He'd put a lot in, just like he did with his coffee, so much that it hadn't all dissolved in the hot tea.

Spencer sat down with me on the floor. "What letter did you make it to?"

"J," I said, smiling.

"You do know it's nearly four in the morning, right?"

"Huh. I thought it was earlier than that."

"No, it's 3:48 in the morning." I leaned my head against his shoulder, still looking at his massive collection of books.

"You can go back to sleep, you know. You don't have to sit up with me."

"I know what it's like to not want to be alone with your own mind." Spencer said. "If we get called out today, I'll just sleep on the plane. I'd rather sit up with you."


	9. Entry Nine

I spent a lot of time alone, before I had Paige. Now I spend a lot of time alone _with _Paige. For example, when I write these journal entries, she is more often than not playing with Schroder on the floor, much to his dismay. He's begrudgingly kind, never hissing or biting or scratching, even if he does wear a sour look on his face the entire time Paige is clipping sparkly barrettes into his fur.

I've always liked to spend time alone. Which, I think, is why it has always been easy for me to deal with the long stretches of time Spencer would go away for work. A lot of people didn't get it, namely Isaac and my own mother.

Despite all the time that Spencer spent at the bookstore early on in our relationship, my parents still hadn't met him when we'd been dating for six months. Six months really isn't that long of a time. Unless, of course, you're never-had-a-boyfriend-before-Gwen-Harper. In which case, six months was practically engaged and your parents were pulling at the bit to meet your boyfriend.

I won't lie, I was using Spencer's unpredictable work schedule as an excuse not to bring him over to my parents' house for dinner.

"I really don't know how you can stand for this boyfriend of yours to be gone for so long," My mom told me one day while I was stocking a new shipment of books we'd gotten. "If it weren't for Isaac swearing up and down that he's real, I'd think you made him up."

Maggie knew he was real, too. She'd met Spencer long before I ever did. But I didn't bring that up.

"It's just his—" I started, but Mom cut me off.

"Work schedule, I know. But not even the United States Government can make their employees work year round. So the next time that boy has some kind of vacation, the two of you better find your way over to our house."

"Yes, Mom," I said with an eye roll she couldn't see.

It wasn't that I didn't want Spencer to meet my parents. I knew it was a step in relationships. A social norm, as Spencer would say. The thing was, I didn't know if Spencer was ready for something like that. I'd already met Diana, but I knew her before I knew Spencer.

We stayed the night at each other's apartments. And I had no problem calling him my boyfriend. I was pretty sure that Spencer liked calling me his girlfriend. But was he ready to meet my parents?

That I had no clue about.

I knew that I was going to have to ask, though. My mother especially was getting anxious about it.

So I waited until Spencer came over after the bookstore was closed. He had a newspaper in his hand, a D.C. newspaper to be exact. I could see the red pen marks he'd made around some of the blurbs.

"Thinking about moving?" I asked with a smile. I had known that Spencer would love D.C., and I was right about it. I also thought it was adorable that he was looking at ads in the newspaper rather than online. Spencer was so old school and against technology.

"I might," he said, putting his newspaper down to give me a kiss. "I've been thinking about it. Like you said, the commute really wouldn't be an issue."

"These are all in the Foggy Bottoms area," I said, smiling wider. I had also guessed that would be the part Spencer would like the best.

"I think you should move there if you want to," I told him, giving him another kiss on the cheek. Each time I kissed Spencer, it brought a blush to his cheeks, and I loved it.

"Are you ready to go?" Spencer asked. We were supposed to be meeting Penelope at some foreign film theatre. Spencer liked the theatre because he liked foreign media better most of the time, whether it be movies or books or art. Penelope liked it because a lot of the films were older, black and white ones and she thought all the leading males were cute.

I liked it just because I liked spending time with both Spencer and Penelope.

"I am now," I said, slipping on my shoes. "And I'm gonna drive." I added. Spencer's driving was technically safe…But of all the things Spencer Reid was genius and master of, driving was not one of them.

I knew I needed to ask Spencer soon about coming over to meet my parents. But I was too nervous and much more excited to be seeing Penelope, so I decided to wait until after the movie.

I always sat in the middle of Spencer and Penelope when we went to watch these foreign movies, because both whispered to me at different times. Spencer whispered the dialogue to me, just like when we would watch movies at one of our apartments. Penelope didn't care much about the dialogue. Somehow she was always able to enjoy the movies without it. Penelope liked to whisper to me about which actor she thought was the cutest or about how beautiful the women's clothing was.

We also liked to each get different candy that we all liked, so all three of us could pass it around during the movie.

I remember the movie we were watching that night was about an Italian man vacationing in Greece, where he fell in love with a Greek girl only for her to fall off a boat, hit her head on her way down, and drown during a party. Suffice it to say, it was sad in a ridiculous kind of way.

"We're getting a new coworker, did you hear?" Penelope asked Spencer once we were back out in the lobby. We were trying to finish off the popcorn before we left. They popped it in coconut oil, and it tasted so good.

"Maybe this time you'll remember their name," Penelope continued, teasing him.

"Whose name couldn't you remember?" I asked.

"Mine! He called me 'the new tech girl' for almost a month."

"I'm not good with names," Spencer mumbled embarrassedly.

"But you remembered mine, and we'd only met once." I reminded Spencer. It was true; we had only had one conversation and then I didn't see him for a while before we met again.

"Obviously Spencer only remembers the names of girls he wants to date," Penelope said, bumping Spencer with her hip. "Her name is Elle Greenaway. I'll write it down for you so you can memorize it ahead of time."

"Wait, I do know who that is. Hotch said she's been wanting to work in our department for a long time."

"Well, Gideon's gonna give her a chance. We'll just have to see how it all goes."

I waited and I waited and I waited to ask Spencer. Actually, I didn't ask him until we were back in my apartment and he was sprawled out on my couch, reading a massive book that I knew wouldn't take him more than twenty minutes, tops, to finish.

"I have a proposition for you," I told Spencer, leaning over the back my couch so that he saw my face instead of his book. Sometimes, when Spencer would be reading, he'd be concentrating so hard that a damn bomb could go off beside him and he wouldn't even glance at it.

"And what would that proposition be?"

"You, Spencer Reid, two weeks away from being twenty-four and still maintaining the title of youngest FBI agent ever, have been invited to my parents' house for dinner. And to meet them."

My heart was just about to bust out of my chest, and do you know what Spencer said after a long pause?

"Okay." With a smile, too.

"Okay?!" I said, smacking his shoulder even though he had no idea why. But I was laughing. "I've been worrying about asking you all day, and all you say is okay!"

"It's wonderfully normal," Spencer said with a big smile. "And I don't get a lot of normal in my life."

So it was settled. Spencer was all set to come to my parents' house the next time he had a day off.

My mom made lasagna. Eric wasn't too terribly teenager-y, and Dad was really impressed with Spencer's slight-of-hand skills, something not even I knew he could do. Spencer joked that it came with growing up in Las Vegas.

Something even better, in my book at least, happened just a few days after Spencer meeting my parents: I was able to see Maggie.

"You're back!" I told her, throwing my arms around her in a hug. That probably sounds like a weird thing to say, but I knew it made sense to her. Maggie and her schizophrenia were not mutually exclusive.

"I'm sure you have a lot to catch me up on."

It was starting to warm up by then, in mid-May, so Maggie and I went out to the gardens to talk.

My parents say, that wen Maggie first went to live at Bennington, I didn't talk to anyone or eat for three days straight. I'd like to think that I wasn't nearly so dramatic at nineteen, but it still took a lot out of me to be separated from her for a long time. I guess it's just a twin thing.

I told Maggie about meeting Penelope and Spencer meeting Mom and Dad and the birthday party Spencer's coworkers had thrown him and about meeting the rest of the team. She told me about how much drugs they'd had to give her during her 'relapse' as she called it and about the cookies Diana had made her once she was deemed stable again.

For the time being, all was in order and right with the world again.


	10. Entry Ten

Spencer and I are both afraid of the dark. That's _super _helpful when you have a three-year-old, because of course, they're afraid of the dark themselves. Though I suppose Paige has a more rational reason to be scared, considering she's a toddler and all.

My fear of the dark is entirely irrational, even by the usual standards of irrational fears. The fear started when I was little, when Maggie and I still shared a bedroom and our beds were so close together that we could reach out and hold hands in the space between.

There were several nights where we would do just that. In our mostly dark bedroom, with just our Disney princess nightlight creating any light in the room, Maggie would reach over and tug on my covers until I would wake up.

"Gwen, wake up," she would whisper and pull on the blankets until I would roll over and hold out my hand for her to take.

"What's wrong?" I would ask, groggy and trying to fight of sleep because I knew Maggie would need me. Maggie would always tell me about the things that she saw in the dark. We thought it was just dreams then, we didn't know it was hallucinations due to her developing schizophrenia.

Maggie took my hand, and she'd whisper to me about the Floor People. This was the hallucination she had the most often back then.

"They live under the floorboards," Maggie said. We had wooden floors in our bedrooms. "They're really skinny and long, like noodles, so that they can fit under the boards."

The Floor People terrified me. But I would always let Maggie tell me about them anyway, because I knew she was terrified, too.

"Since they're so skinny, it doesn't even matter if you lock the door, 'cause they'll just slide underneath it. They can get inside you, too, and steal your body to use for their own."

Of course I was scared of the Floor People when I was little. What kid wouldn't be? Suffice it to say that _Flat Stanley _books didn't go over well with me. My fear of the Floor People stayed throughout my teenage years and into adulthood, though. Only over time I was more scared of what seeing the Floor People would mean rather than just seeing them in general.

I was envious of the fact that Spencer was already twenty-four. Generally speaking, most people—if they are going to develop schizophrenia—do so by their mid-twenties. Spencer was a lot closer to being in the clear than I was, at just nineteen then.

We had these common fears, the dark and the possibility of schizophrenia, but there was something that Spencer was scared of that I never had a reason to fear in my life: guns.

You see, though he had been serving as an FBI agent for a few years, Spencer didn't carry a gun. I hadn't noticed that at first, that he didn't have a holster and a gun like the rest of the team. I did notice before Spencer ever talked to me about it, but I didn't want to ask.

I, thanks to my father, have always been pretty comfortable around guns. My father couldn't protect Eric and myself from our DNA; if either of us were going to be schizophrenic like Maggie, there would be nothing he could do about it. But he could protect us in other ways, and one of those ways was making sure we were educated about guns and knew how to use them.

My father took me to the gun range for the first time when I was ten years old. He did the same for Eric.

"I can't pass the gun qualification exam," Spencer told me out of the blue. This is how Spencer works—he keeps a lot of things to himself and thinks them over, and then sometimes they all come tumbling out at once.

"My sister used to tell me about these horrifying hallucinations she called the Floor People."

Spencer looked up at me with an expression of confusion and amusement mixed together.

"I thought we were telling each other why we suck at chess today," I said with a shrug. We were sitting on the floor playing chess, Schroder going between the two of us for attention. At that moment, Schroder had crawled inside my sweatshirt (which was actually Spencer's), and he was curled up against my stomach.

I had hardwood floors in my apartment above the store, and I was thinking about the Floor People more than I was the game. I guess Spencer had been thinking more about the gun thing. We had been playing for nearly half an hour without him beating me.

"Is that why you don't have your own?"

"Yeah," Spencer said. "I just can't do it."

This was another thing about Spencer. Anyone who knows Spencer knows he is the king of random facts and endless information. I've heard his coworkers/friends tease him about it for years. But after a while that fell away when we were together.

"I know how to shoot," I told him, moving one of my knights. "I can help you."

He reached over the board to ruffle my hair. I had recently cut it again, because Maggie's had grown to about my length. But this time I had gotten it cut into a pixie cut. It was shorter than Spencer's at the time, but I didn't care. I really liked the haircut, mostly because it gave me an excuse to wear headbands and bows every day.

And that is how one of my most memorable dates with Spencer involved guns. We went to the shooting range the next time Spencer had a day off.

"The most important thing to remember," I told Spencer, echoing the words my father had told me years before, "is that a gun is just a thing until _you _give it power." I don't know how helpful that was for a twenty-four year old man, but it had made twelve year old me feel better when I first heard it, so I said it anyway.

"_You_ are always in control of the gun. It's not going to fire unless you put in the bullets and pull the trigger, and the bullet isn't going to go anywhere other than where you aim it."

Those might have all just been dad-isms, but they sounded good, right? They sounded like the right things to say to someone who was obviously afraid of the unloaded, safety activated gun I place in their hands.

I showed Spencer how to square his feet to brace his body for the kick of the gun and how to aim it.

But I had underestimated just how nervous and afraid Spencer was, because when he took his first shot, which I had instructed him to aim for the X marking the heart on the paper silhouette of a person, he missed so badly that the bullet went through the leg area.

I knew why: he had second-guessed himself at the last minute, changing the aim of his gun so drastically that the bullet had no chance of hitting the intended target.

We were going to have a lot of work to do.

"You need to trust yourself," I told Spencer when he had taken off the noise cancelling headphones they give you at gun ranges. "I know it's a scary thing, even if it is just a thing. But like I told you earlier, _you _control it. You can't let it control you."

"It's just not something I'm good at," Spencer said, shaking his head. If there's one thing Spencer doesn't like in this world, it's not being good at something. It's a feeling that doesn't come naturally to him, being the genius that he is and all.

"It's something you can get good at, though," I told him. I could tell he didn't really believe me by the look in his eyes, though.

We tried again and again and again and again that day. Spencer did get a little better, once he got more comfortable with the gun and I had finally convinced him to trust his first aim. It was still off by a large margin on most shots, but nowhere near intending to shoot through the heart and hitting the leg instead.

Here's the funny thing about fears, though: It doesn't matter how much coaching and motivation and support you have. You don't truly get over a fear until you have faced it, looked it head on, and found the courage to survive it and prove to yourself that there was nothing to fear in the first place. _That _is the only way to overcome a fear.

That is how Spencer overcame his fear of guns.

From the stories I've heard from both Hotch and Spencer, when confronted with a life-or-death situation that could have ended with both Spence and Hotch being killed, Spencer was able to successfully shoot the unsub that had them trapped.

The story of Spencer's first successful shot is also the first story of danger I had heard from Spencer's job. I mean, I knew it was a dangerous job, but no one had ever detailed one of the cases to me before this one. And I'm pretty sure I only got the story because Spencer came back from that case with Hotch's gun.

"What's that?" I had asked Spencer when he walked into my apartment. He had a key by then, because it was easier with the hours he kept for him to have a way to come and go. Spencer had the gun wrapped in a towel and placed in a shoe box.

"This is Hotch's gun," Spencer said, holding it up like it was the Holy Grail itself. "Hotch put in an order to get me my own gun, overriding the gun qualification test requirements."

"I shot it during the case we were on…and I killed a person…and I can't make myself feel bad about it."

His look of triumph quickly melted into one of confusion and hurt and sadness. I put Schroder on the ground from my lap and got up from my computer desk to wrap my arms around Spencer's waist.

"Were they going to hurt you?" I asked. My voice was muffled against Spencer's cardigan.

"And Hotch," he said. He was standing stock-still, despite my arms around him.

"And they had already killed lots of innocent people, hadn't they?" I didn't get to know a lot of the details about Spencer's cases, but I knew that a case was only brought to the BAU's attention if it was a serial killer of some sort.

"Yes…"

"Then you don't need to feel bad about killing them," I told him, squeezing him extra tight. I didn't let go even after I felt Spencer hug me back after a few minutes. I knew he needed this validation from me, and he'd need it from his team. Killing a bad person didn't make you a bad person.


	11. Entry Eleven

It was just a few weeks after mine and Maggie's twentieth birthday that the first of what Paige would call a 'truly bad thing' happened. Just as a quick side note, trying not to write about Paige and to write all of these chronologically is so hard. If you're a parent, I think you can agree that the love you have for your child is all-consuming and you kind of just want to talk about them and brag about them constantly.

I will restrain myself as much as I can, because truly this entry has nothing to do with my sweet Paige. These next few entries are about something altogether different: Tobias Hankel and Spencer's dilaudid addiction.

I learned everything I know about Tobias Hankel after the fact, from Spencer. The information was classified, since it involved a serial killer and an FBI agent. Confidentiality be damned, though.

Before getting into this story and its aftermath, I need to mention something: I have always been against any kind of mind-altering substance. It's a stance I took when I was young, soon after Maggie was medically diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was only five, but I was also nosy and a quick learner, so I soon figured out that some things tricked your mind and I made a connection between that and schizophrenia, which also tricks your mind.

I've never drank alcohol. I've never done any kind of illegal drug. Prior to the age of five, I'm sure I'd been given pain medication and such, but after a particularly good crying fit I convinced my parents not to give me any ever again.

I'll take medication when I really need to, like if I get strep throat or something, but if it's something I can endure on my own, I'll forego medicine.

That means, if you were wondering, yes, I had Paige with absolutely no pain medication, and yes, it was quite the experience. But more on that later.

I'll give you the summary of what happened with Spencer and Tobias, because I don't much like to think about it:

Tobias kidnapped Spencer while the team was investigating a series of murders. These murders were all done by Tobias, but initially they didn't know that because Tobias had a split personality. The more dominate personality, 'Raphael', commanded Tobias to kill whether he wanted to or not. When Tobias would try to resist, according to Spencer, a third personality would come out: Tobias' father, Charles, who also had murdering tendencies.

Raphael and Charles also compelled Tobias to kidnap and torture Spencer. Raphael and Charles did the torturing; Tobias provided a small mercy and continuously injected Spencer with dilaudid to take away the pain.

The dilaudid gave Spencer a seizure, which he miraculously survived while still captured, and also gave him intense hallucinations and flashbacks into his childhood. It also got him quickly addicted, as Tobias was injecting it so often.

From what I've been told, Tobias/Raphael broadcasted this cycle of torture to the BAU team so that they were forced to watch it.

The torture and dilaudid injections took place for roughly a day. Eventually, Spencer was able to overcome Tobias/Raphael/Charles and shot him. Spencer also took what was left of the dilaudid off of Tobias' body.

I didn't get a call until it was sure that Spencer would survive. I don't think Derek was supposed to call me, since Spencer and I weren't married then and I had no legal right to know the information. But he did, and I'm still so thankful that he got my number from Spencer's cell phone and called me.

I only ever know the bare-bones of what a case entails, usually just where Spencer is going. So all I knew before Derek's phone call was that the team was heading to Atlanta.

I remember I was in the middle of working on a big project, which my group members seemed incapable of contributing to, when I got the call.

"Hello?" I had answered, because I didn't recognize the phone number.

"Hey, Gwen, it's Derek Morgan. Listen, Reid, I mean Spencer, he got hurt on this case. He's being treated in Atlanta, but he's going to be fine."

"…What do you mean hurt?" I asked, my heart sinking and racing at the same time. I heard Derek sigh on the other end.

"I wish I could tell you more, but I'm not even supposed to be telling you as much as I have. I promise though, Gwen, he's going to be fine. I can tell you the name of the hospital here in Atlanta, but I don't think they're going to keep him more than overnight. He'd probably be discharged by the time you could get here."

I understood there were protocols and that Derek could get in huge trouble for providing information to someone who isn't legally family. And he was right, it would take too long to drive to Atlanta. So I thanked him and resigned myself to a waiting game.

I wanted more than anything to call Maggie, but it was far past Bennington's calling hours. So I called Isaac instead. I was already a blubbering mess by then, and bless Isaac, he got to my apartment so quickly even though I'd woken him up with my call.

Isaac let me cry on his shoulder and reassured me that Spencer would be fine because "that fine piece of ass" Derek Morgan had said so, and why would someone that gorgeous lie? Isaac even stayed the night with me since I didn't really want to be alone, and I made him breakfast in the morning.

"Staying the night at the boss's place sure has its perks," Isaac said, shoveling pancakes into his mouth. Even then Isaac called me 'the boss', but all the power I had then was stocking and signing his time sheets. My parents still owned the bookstore, but he just called them Mr. and Mrs. Harper.

Derek was right. They treated Spencer, kept him through the night for observation, and released him the next day. The team stayed in Atlanta until Spencer was released. I was in Quantico at Spencer's apartment as soon as he was home.

He was covered in bruises and cuts and he was limping, but he insisted he would be okay. I was crying again and hugging him around his waist.

"I got lucky," he told me. "If it weren't for you and Hotch, I wouldn't have had a gun on me. I wouldn't have been able to get out of there."

He seemed okay, despite it all. I didn't know that was largely in thanks to the dilaudid. I was just happy he was okay.

"You scared me to death," I told him while he wiped my face dry of tears.

"I told you dating and FBI agent was going to be different," Spencer pointed out.

He told me about getting separated from JJ and getting captured by Tobias and about having to choose someone for Tobias to kill. He told me about Tobias forcing him to choose one of his own team members to die.

Spencer told me everything with shaking hands and a restless leg, but I thought the jitters were from the shock and adrenaline left over from what had happened while he was captured. I didn't know he was feigning.

I made Spencer dinner while he took a nap. Neither Spencer nor I sleep a whole lot, so if you see dark circles under our eyes, it's nothing new. But those under Spencer's eyes that day looked more like deep, angry bruises than anything. I knew he was exhausted from everything he'd been through. The department had given him a few days off to recuperate, and I planned on staying with him for all of it.

Spencer ate ton of food, saying that the hospital food had sucked. I stayed with him the whole time he was off, doing his laundry and cleaning his apartment and cooking for him when I wasn't at work or in class.

To this day I'm not sure how Spencer was able to hide his dilaudid use so well during those days off. But he did.

I understand why Spencer was addicted, I really do. I don't want you to think that I was unsympathetic. It was a dark time in our relationship, though, as you'll soon see.


	12. Entry Twelve

Being in the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI, Spencer obviously knew the calling-card behaviors of a drug addict. He had studied them, hunted them, interviewed them. Spencer knew everything that he didn't need to be in order to keep the dilaudid a secret.

So I guess none of us should have been surprised that Spencer was able to hide it so well. Spencer tends to wear button-up shirts and cardigans, even when he isn't at work, so it also wasn't unreasonable that I wouldn't notice track marks on his arms.

I know these all sound like excuses. They do to me, too. To this day I feel like I should have known better, that I should have realized there was more going on than just Spencer dealing with the aftermath of Tobias.

I think the first time I noticed there was something more than just the whole Tobias situation eating at Spencer when he snapped at me. This had never happened before. Spencer is usually incredibly mild-mannered and kind.

Spencer had left some clothes at my apartment, which wasn't anything unusual. I was going to do my laundry that day anyway, so I gathered up Spencer's to put in the wash, too. He had already left for work that morning and I didn't have to go downstairs to the bookstore, so I had some time to kill anyway.

I was in my bathroom getting the towels to throw in the laundry, too, when I heard the door open. I thought it was one of my parents or maybe Isaac; Spencer didn't have any reason to be there, so I was surprised when I walked out of the bathroom to see him.

"Oh, hey, Spence," I said, smiling at him. But he didn't smile back, he just looked frustrated.

"Where are those pants I left here?" He asked. I told him they were in my little laundry room, that I was about to do laundry. That's when he got kind of angry.

"I know how to do laundry. You don't have to do everything for me."

Spencer has _never _raised a hand to me, but the tone of his voice that day felt like a physical slap to the face. I think I was so upset because I had been doing a lot for Spencer after Tobias and I was so worried for him all the time because he hadn't talked about it since the day he got back to Virginia after it happened.

I felt myself actually recoil and stop in my tracks, because I was going to go to the laundry room to get the pants for him. But Spencer had already gone in there. He didn't take the pants with him, so I thought maybe he had forgotten his wallet or something. I didn't ask.

Spencer came out of the laundry room and left without saying another word to me. I tried to shrug it off, because he had been through a lot recently. I just tried to ignore it.

I remember having this feeling that it wasn't Spencer who had snapped at me, because it was so unlike him to speak that way.

It kind of reminded me of Maggie, before she went to live at Bennington. I knew even then that the schizophrenia wasn't Maggie, but neither was the zombie that the pills turned her into. Neither of those were Maggie.

And I felt certain Spencer wasn't Spencer that day.

He apologized later that day when he got off of work. I told him it was okay, but that it was pretty obvious he was still shaken up about the whole Tobias thing.

"Maybe you should talk to someone about it," I suggested.

"Hotch already has me in therapy," Spencer snapped.

So I dropped it. But just because I didn't mention it, that didn't mean that I didn't notice what was going on.

Spencer became very particular about his pockets. He checked his pockets all the time, like he was always afraid of losing something. It didn't take a profiler to realize something wasn't okay.

I had saved Derek's phone number after the day he called me to tell me about Spencer being hurt, because I figured it would come in handy one day. So I gave it about two weeks to see if anything would change with Spencer, but he was still moody and testy and snappy. So I called Derek to ask him if he or the team had noticed anything odd about Spencer.

"I'm worried about him," I told Derek. I hadn't told anyone what had been going on, not even Maggie. When I would run into Diana at Bennington and she would ask how Spencer was doing, I smiled and lied and said he was fine.

Saying the words out loud to Derek brought the tears I'd been refusing for days to come to my eyes.

"We are too," Derek said. "There's definitely something going on with him. I don't know what yet, but I'll tell you as soon as I figure anything out."

"Okay, me too. Thanks."

After talking to Derek, I went downstairs to the bookstore. Even when there were customers there, I liked to play the piano, and the regulars never minded. Newcomers usually thought it was pretty alright, too.

I think I'd probably been playing for about an hour when Isaac came over in his barista apron and sat down beside me on the piano bench. He put his hands over mine and grabbed onto them, stilling them in the air above the piano keys.

"Why are you upset?" He asked.

"I don't know what you mean." Isaac rolled his eyes dramatically.

"Yes, you do. Don't try to bullshit me, Gwenyth," Isaac always uses my full name when he's being overly serious. "You always play Chopin when you're upset. It's an adorable, if pompous, quirk of yours."

"Thanks," I said, bumping him with my shoulder. "But I don't want to talk about it at work."

"After work, then. I need to do laundry anyway, and all the washers and dryers are broken in my dorm."

"Mi washer and dryer es su washer and dryer," I told him. "Now get back to work, you have a line forming."

"Oh, shit, okay. I'll come by after my shift."

Isaac came over with just about every article of clothing he had. Spencer and the team were gone; I'd gotten a text from Spencer earlier in the day saying he'd be in Texas until further notice for a case.

"He's just been acting weird," I told Isaac, moving some Clipart around in the PowerPoint I was working on for class.

"Well, _yeah_," Isaac answered. "He was captured and tortured. Anyone would be acting weird after that." I flinched at how casually Isaac had said 'captured and tortured'.

"I know…it's just hard to explain, but he hasn't been himself. Which I understand, I do, but I don't know, Isaac. I just have this feeling something more is going on."

"Like what?" Isaac asked, plopping himself down on the couch beside me after loading his laundry.

"That's the thing. I'm not sure. But his teammates have noticed it too, or at least Derek Morgan has."

"You've been talking to that fine piece of ass without me? I'm hurt," Isaac said, clutching at his shirt over his heart. I gave him a kick.

"Be serious!" I said, but I was laughing at his theatrics.

"Okay, fine. I seriously think you should just ask him out right what's going on."

I considered Isaac's advice, but I knew I wasn't brave enough for such things.

Maggie told me the same thing when I visited her that Sunday.

"You should just ask him, Gwen. Why are you asking me for advice, anyway? I live in a sanitarium, it's not like I'm a relationship guru." I felt bad then. I always felt bad when I thought about the differences between my life and Maggie's, all because of some kind of genetic glitch I somehow escaped.

I didn't have to take either of their advice, though. Because after a case in New Orleans, Spencer came clean.

I knew Spencer had come in despite having my headphones in because Schroder suddenly bolted from my lap. Schroder loves Spencer so much it's insane. I smiled and waited for them to come into my bedroom, where I was doing homework at my desk.

Spencer appeared in the doorway with Schroder in his arms. Schroder was rubbing his face against Spencer's, and I'm sure he was purring loudly. Spencer gave me a weak kind of smile and sat on my bed. He put Schroder beside him before patting the spot on the bed next to him for me to come and sit.

I took out my headphones and joined him on my bed.

"What's up?" I asked. He didn't say anything, but he took a deep breath and reached into his pocket. When he took his hand out and opened his palm, a little glass vial sat in it. It was nearly empty, with only a little clear liquid left in it.

"What's dil-u-a-did?" I asked, turning the bottle around in my own hand so I could look at the label.

"Dilaudid," Spencer corrected. "It's an over the counter pain medication."

"Oh," I said, some pieces falling into place in my head. I looked up at Spencer, but he had his head ducked. "Why do you have it?"

"Because I took it off of Tobias Hankel's body," Spencer said. His voice caught over Tobias' name.

I was silent, watching Spencer. I was afraid to ask, afraid to hear him say it. So I waited, because I didn't want to be the one to make the words come out.

"He—Tobias—he injected me with it. And after he died, I took it."

"You've been injecting yourself?" I asked, staring down at the tiny vial in my hand. "You're addicted?"

Spencer didn't answer with words but with a sob. Carefully, I placed what was left of the dilaudid on my bedside table before wrapping my arms around Spencer. It was a long time before he could speak again.

"That's all I've had, what's been left in that bottle," Spencer told me. "I've been rationing it. It's lasted longer than I thought it would."

I did the math in my head. It had been about a month and a half since Tobias Hankel died. Spencer had incredible willpower for a drug addict, to make such a small amount last so long.

I was quiet, mostly because I didn't know what to say. I was feeling a lot of things. I was sad for Spencer, that this happened to him. I was angry at myself for not knowing that this was going on. And I was disappointed, because of all the things I expected from Spencer, drug addiction would never be one of them.

"So what are we going to do?" I finally asked.

"I'm going to stop. Cold turkey. That's why I gave you the vial."

"Spencer, that's dangerous! You can die quitting cold turkey."

"It's the only way to do it," Spencer said with such conviction that I didn't argue. "And it has to be soon. This weekend. I already asked for the days off, and Hotch gave them to me with no questions asked even though it was short notice. It has to be this weekend, Gwen."

"Okay," I said, because I couldn't think of any reason to disagree. "Okay. What do you want me to do?"

"Get rid of the rest of it," Spencer said, looking over at the vial. His hands had already begun to shake. I didn't know how long it had been since his last hit.

"Okay," I said. Why do people say 'okay' so much when they don't know what to say? "I can do that."

I took the vial into my bathroom and poured the little bit left in my sink. Then I rinsed the vial out with water and wrapped it in two wash cloths. I pressed down on the little bundle I had made until I felt the glass give underneath my hand. I threw the shards and the wash cloths in the trash.

"It's gone," I told Spencer, sitting down beside him again. Crying had left his eyes red-rimmed. He nodded back to me.

"What do you want me to do now?" I asked. Spencer kind of laughed and gave me a sad little smile.

"Could you make sure I _don't _die these next few days?"

The withdrawal was terrible. Spencer's skin turned a sickly shade of yellow-green for a few days. He shook constantly and had terrible headaches that made him throw up. He ate a lot of soup, because solid foods were too much for his stomach. And he was always cold. My apartment felt like an oven because he kept cranking the heat up despite it being warm and balmy outside.

Schroder stood guard like a little nurse over Spencer. I don't think he left Spencer's side the whole two days it took Spencer to dry out from the dilaudid.

It was a holiday weekend, so Spencer would have had that Monday off anyway. By Monday night his temperature had regulated and he felt well enough to eat the grilled cheese sandwich and some Goldfish crackers I gave him with his tomato soup. He was still pale, but his skin wasn't sallow anymore.

"You know, I think you just might live, Spencer Reid," I said, smiling at him.

"I think I will," he agreed. "Thank you.

"Just remember I'm the best girlfriend ever," I told him, stopping to kiss him on the head as I took the dishes from his finished dinner back into the kitchen.

"There was never any competition for that," Spencer called after me.

"Yeah, well you still shouldn't forget it. Gwen Harper, best girlfriend in the world." I wrapped myself into the blanket Spencer was laying under and laid my head on his chest. Spencer chuckled and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

"I could never forget that, literally. I have an eidetic memory, remember?"

"Oh, hush. You geniuses, always bragging," I teased him.

For the first time in nearly two months, things felt good with Spencer again.

Things felt even better sitting on that couch just a few moments later.

"There's something I don't want you to forget, either," Spencer told me.

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "What's that?"

"I love you, Gwen." Since my head was on his chest, I could hear how fast his heart was beating as he said the words. It made me smile and I gave him a squeeze as I said it back to him.

"I love you, too, Spencer."


	13. Entry Thirteen

They say once you are an addict, you're _always_ an addict. That's absolutely true. For a lot of people, they find the initial quitting of the habit much easier than the abstaining. There's a reason why there are so many relapses among drug addicts.

Quitting dilaudid was easy when Spencer was too sick to take care of himself and more or less confined to my apartment. Abstaining from a drug that was relatively easy to access was going to be the real challenge.

"I'm going to go to meetings," Spencer told me when he was better. The withdrawals and quitting cold turkey had hit him hard.

"Does Hotch know about any of this at all?" I asked in return. I was amazed that Hotch, as Spencer's boss, hadn't said a word about any of it. Spencer's face turned red.

"He's been kind enough to turn a blind eye." He told me. In the same breath he said, "Did you know the original meaning of 'cold turkey' meant to 'speaking plainly'? It got adapted somewhere along the line to mean 'quitting plainly' when used in conjunction to drug use."

I smiled and kissed Spencer on his temple. A lot of people have noted on Spencer's unease in social situations and his tendency to blurt out facts and go on tangents without realizing. It's off-putting for some people, but I've always seen it as Spencer's way of making himself more comfortable when he's nervous or embarrassed—he forces the conversation onto ground that he knows well.

Spencer is a man of his word. I knew then he would never abuse dilaudid again, because he had said so. I would hope he knew it, too, though Spencer's never been one to have an abundance of confidence in himself. But I knew.

The first few weeks were the hardest, I think. I didn't have to be a profiler to know when he was craving it.

Those were the days when his hands would shake at random times and he would bounce his leg and he would get frustrated with the smallest things. The meetings helped a lot, being around people who had gone through similar things that he had. I tried to help, too.

When Spencer's hands shook, I placed mine over his to steady them. When Spencer's leg would start to bob up and down, I would draw patterns on his thigh with my fingertip until it calmed. When Spencer got frustrated with something, I'd take whatever it was out of his hands and wrap my arms around his middle and made sure I never let go until he did.

I have always been incredibly proud of Spencer for quitting the dilaudid addiction. To this day, he has never relapsed. He's never again picked up a needle or tiny vial filled with clear liquid.

There was only ever once that I feared Spencer might turn back to the drug, and that's when Gideon left the BAU.

Gideon was like a father figure and mentor to Spencer, and Spencer only ever has high praise for the man. He gave Spencer advice and guidance when he first joined the BAU. The few times I was able to be around Gideon, it was obvious he was as fond of Spencer as Spencer was of him.

So when Gideon left the BAU with no warning, no word, and disappeared without a trace save for a letter addressed to Spencer, the whole team felt the hurt. But Spencer hurt the most.

You would have thought the man was dead, which he very well could have been, since his letter to Spencer didn't disclose any details about his decision to leave or his whereabouts.

"I went to his cabin and he was gone. This was the only thing there," Spencer showed me the envelope with his name written on it. There were tears in his eyes, but he didn't let them fall. I've never asked what was inside the letter, and I don't think anyone on the BAU team has, either.

Spencer was upset for weeks after Gideon left. Since Gideon had been in the FBI for so long, he knew exactly how to disappear in our modern world. Not even Garcia's best efforts wielded any kind of results.

Already two of Spencer's coworkers had left. Elle Greenaway had left the BAU shortly before Gideon had, but that hadn't really upset Spencer. I only met Elle once, but she was standoffish and I don't think she was exactly a peach to be around at work. Obviously the FBI was just as liable to have living casualties as it was fatal casualties.

Despite the depression that followed Gideon leaving, Spencer was somehow able to get through it. I never told a soul about the dilaudid, not even Maggie. I'm telling all of you now, but it's so far after the fact that it's really inconsequential.

These two occurrences happening back to back made for quite the rough patch in Spencer's life and in our relationship. We got through it, though, which was hard but it's something you do when you love someone.

* * *

Now that I've told you a lot of sad things, I'll tell you a happier, funny story. One day, when Hotch had some time off, he asked Spencer to watch his son Jack. Usually, Hotch's wife's sister would babysit Jack. But Haley's sister was busy, and Spencer was the only other member of the team who had time off at the same time as Hotch did. So naturally the task fell to Spencer.

Spencer is an excellent father, by the way. But at the time, he had no clue what to do with kids, let alone a little boy as active as Jack. So he called me.

"Um, I need your help," was how Spencer responded to my 'hey' when I answered the phone. I couldn't help but laugh and rub it in, because I had already offered to go with him to the Hotchners' and help him watch Jack.

"I told you that you would."

"Just hurry. I'll text you the address."

It took a little bit to get to the house, since they didn't live in the same town I did, and when I did get there, it was a _mess._

"I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have any experience with this," Spencer said when he opened the front door.

Obviously the word 'no' hadn't occurred to Spencer before I arrived. Jack's a good boy, he really is, but he was barely more than a toddler then and stubborn at that. I walked over to where Jack was playing in a mess of toys and bent down to his level.

"Hi, Jack. My name is Gwen. I'm Spencer's girlfriend. Have you ever played a game called hide and seek?" That got his attention. He shook his little blonde head.

"Me and my brother used to play. He was really good at it, but I think you'll be better. To play, you have to go find a really good hiding place while I count and then I'm going to come find you. Do you want to do that?" This time I got a big smile and a nod. So I told Jack to run and hide while I counted in the living room.

"Since _I_ came up with a way to keep him occupied, _you_ have to clean all of this up," I told Spencer with a smirk.

I played hide and seek with Jack for over an hour. That kid was surprisingly good at the game, probably because he was so little. He was able to fit his tiny boy in crazy places, like the cabinet under the bathroom sink.

And it had the desired effect, which was wearing Jack out enough that when I found him hiding under the kitchen table, he'd fallen asleep. I picked him up and carried him to his bedroom.

"I get all credit for this, since I got him to go to bed," I told Spencer, who was washing the pan he used earlier to cook Jack some Spaghetti-os. With his sleeves rolled up, I could see the little needle mark in his left arm. I think he must have always used the same spot, because it left the tiniest of scars behind.

"I fed him. That's at least half of babysitting. I also cleaned up the mess."

"That mess would still be all over the floor if it weren't for me, who played hide and seek for over an hour."

"Yeah, but you didn't even do any of the hiding, all you did was find Jack."

"Let's not split hairs here. I'm obviously the babysitting queen," I said, lifting myself to sit on the kitchen counter. It brought me face to face with Spencer, thanks to the height boost. Spencer is quite a bit taller than I am, despite me being around average height for a woman.

"Whatever you say," Spencer said, leaning over the sink to kiss me.

Neither of us knew then, that in less than a year and after only around three years of dating by the time she was born, that we'd have a baby of our own.


	14. Entry Fourteen

Paige was not planned, if you haven't figured that out already. I was three months shy of my twenty-second birthday, and Spencer and I were six months shy of our third anniversary, when I found out I was pregnant. Spencer's coworker JJ was five months pregnant herself at the time.

I don't think anyone should be two terribly surprised that two adults were having sex. I'm just not going to tell you about it.

I will tell you about the day I found out I was pregnant, though. Interestingly, it started with me teasing Isaac about his own birth origins.

"I feel like I should get some of the slack the foreign students get. I mean, technically, I am foreign goods." Isaac said. We were sitting in the book shop, neither of us on the clock but both of us doing homework.

"Oh, yes, I'm sure those nine months in South Korea were terribly taxing on your English language development," I answered, rolling my eyes. Isaac was adopted when he was nine months old. His Korean name is Sung-hoon.

"It was," Isaac insisted. "For nine month, I heard my native tongue, and then it was all ripped away from me." He dramatically looked up, as if he could remember that far back.

"Say one thing in Korean, besides your own name."

"Okay, you've got me there. But I'm still technically foreign."

"Technicalities," I said, waving my hand in the air as if to shoo away the topic.

"You have to go to the fancy brain doctor today, huh?" Isaac asked.

Since Maggie developed schizophrenia as a kid, and I was considered extremely high risk for developing it, it was highly advised that I get a brain scan and evaluation monthly.

"Sure do. I get to lay completely still in a little tube." It wasn't all that bad. There are actually articles of study published about Maggie and I, since it is such a unique case, but our names aren't used. We're referred to as Subject A and Subject B. I'm Subject A, because I'm four minutes older.

"Aren't you supposed to be there at three?" Isaac's tone of voice sounded like he was scolding me. I glanced at the time on my laptop screen: 2:45.

"Oh, shit. Will you put this in my dad's office?" I asked, gesturing to the mess of papers and laptop on the table. "I'll come get it later."

"Yeah, yeah. You've been really bad about forgetting things lately."

He was right. I had been forgetting everything for weeks. If I didn't write it down, no matter what it was, it was highly likely I'd forget it and it wouldn't get done.

I shrugged at Isaac and grabbed my car keys. I had to hurry to get to the appointment on time.

Part of the process of getting a head scan is a required pregnancy test. I don't know if everyone knows that, but it's not exactly advised to expose unborn children to high doses of radiation. So for women, they _always_ have to get a pregnancy test done beforehand.

Mine had always come back negative. There was no reason for them not to be negative; I was on birth control and Spencer and I were very careful.

To top it off, I had never even considered having kids. That was actually part of 'the talk' my mother gave me when I was old enough: _It wouldn't be a good idea for you to ever have kids, Gwen. Not unless you adopt them._

So to say that I never thought that Spencer and I having a child as a possibility before it was a reality is a vast understatement. I think you can imagine my surprise when I was told I would _not _be having the regular monthly scan I usually got.

"I'm sorry, dear, but it seems you came all the way out here for nothing," a sweet older nurse with deep dimples told me. I looked up at her from the little clipboard I was filling out paperwork on. I was the only one in the waiting room.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Is the machine broken or something."

"I take it you don't have any idea. Dear, you're pregnant."

I dropped my pen, I know that much.

"…You're sure? My file wasn't messed up with someone else's?"

She smiled at me, mistaking my terror for something more positive, and handed me the sheet of paper with the word 'yes' circled on it. "We can do a blood test if you'd like, but I'm positively sure you are."

"I think a blood test would be a good idea. Just to be really sure."

I don't want you to get the impression that I never wanted Paige, because I did. As soon as I knew she existed, I wanted her more than anything in the world, even if I was terrified of how people would react and what a baby with mine and Spencer's genes would be in for.

Abortion never crossed my mind as an option. That is not to say that I don't understand and support other women's decision to get one, but it was never what I wanted or felt was right. Not even with all the risks.

Of course the blood test came back positive, because I was unmistakably pregnant. Even when I skipped a period the month before, which happens sometimes with me, I never considered that I could be pregnant.

The nice nurse pulled some strings for me and took me to a different wing of the hospital to see an OB/GYN. At least I didn't have to make another appointment, and the doctor was nice—Dr. Anna Prince. She was my doctor for my whole pregnancy with Paige.

"You didn't know?" Dr. Prince asked, trying to make small talk despite the rather awkward position you're kind of forced into with these things. Figuring out how far along you are involves two things: invasiveness and a lot of guess work.

"No, I didn't." I think the worst part about being checked was how cold everything was. I don't know what it is with that, but everything is freezing.

Dr. Prince asked me when my last period was. I had to look through my phone's calendar for that, because that's how I keep track of them. By her best guess, I was six weeks pregnant.

A month and a half and I never knew.

"That's not unusual," Dr. Prince reassured me. "A lot of women don't realize because they see a very specific set of symptoms depicted in movies. Not every woman will have fatigue, unusual cravings, and morning sickness. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?"

"Just a sudden talent of forgetting everything." Dr. Prince smiled at me.

"Pregnancy brain as we like to call it. Totally normal."

Dr. Prince wrote me a prescription for prenatal vitamins and scheduled an appointment for me to come back in a few weeks.

As you might expect, Spencer was not in Virginia when I found out. He was in Idaho of all places, working on a case. And this was not something I could text him or call him about.

"That was quick," Isaac said when I got back to the store. He was still working on homework, and he had _not _put my stuff away like I'd asked him.

"Uh, the machine was broken," I lied. Then I lied again. "I'm gonna go lay down, I'm not feeling too good."

"How do you always get sick this time of the semester? It's like freaky clock work with you."

"I'm nothing if not consistent," I told him, gathering up my stuff. The truth was that I just wanted to be alone with my news for a little while. I still needed to process it.

The first thing I did when I was alone was look up pregnancy. Symptoms, trimesters, fetal development. You named it, I Googled it.

Did you know at six weeks, babies are a quarter of an inch long? Or that they begin to develop their arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouths, noses, and lungs? My baby was hard at work and I didn't even know she was there.

Schroeder had taken his usual spot in my lap by this point, and I was scratching his head. "Enjoy this while you can, Schroedy. You're going to have to be a brother soon."

After my dad closed the book shop for the day, I went downstairs and got a copy of every book I could find in our store about pregnancy. Then I spent the next three days reading them until Spencer got home from the case.

During those three days I bounced between being overjoyed to tell Spencer and dissolving into a heap of tears for fear of his reaction. This was normal, according to all my new reading material. Fluctuating hormones are a real bitch.

Mostly I was happy, though. And I didn't have any reason to be worried.

"Hi," I told Spencer, after letting myself into his apartment. He was laying on his bed, reading. I positioned myself so that I was in his line of sight, blocking his book. "You should pay attention to me."

"Why would I do that when I have the work of Chaucer in front of me?" He teased, and I smacked him playfully on the arm.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because you haven't seem your most awesome girlfriend in five days?"

"And what has my most awesome girlfriend been up to for five days?" Spencer asked, mimicking my tone of voice.

"Well, I have a surprise for you." Spencer set down his book and looked at me expectantly. My heart was beating so fast, it's a wonder it didn't my chest wasn't pounding like on those cartoons when characters are scared.

Very suddenly I could not meet his eye, and I kind of felt like I might throw up. But I made myself continue, because I couldn't not tell him and then, nine months later, be like 'Surprise, we have a kid!'

"How," I started, trying to keep my voice calm and steady, "would you like to be a father?" My voice nearly broke over the word.

"Wait, what?" Spencer asked, sitting up so quickly he almost knocked me off the bed. He caught me by the arm before I could slip off.

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"You're sure?"

"Positive as positive can be."

And then Spencer swept me into a hug so that I was sitting in his lap and his face was buried against my hair. He didn't let go for a very long time.

"You're happy then?" I asked, my voice muffled by the fabric of his shirt. I wriggled away from him so I could see his face, and only then did I realize my hair had become damp with tears.

I took in the smile on Spencer's face. "I always wanted to be a dad."

"Well, good, because you are," I told him, smiling now, too.

Spencer and I were over the moon, but as you'll soon see, not everyone considered our baby a bundle of joy.


	15. Entry Fifteen

They say that you're supposed to wait until the second trimester to start telling everyone about your pregnancy. Most miscarriages happen within the first three months of pregnancy. I was around six weeks pregnant when we found out, which mean I had to wait about six more before I could tell anyone.

Except I told Maggie before then. I never cared or worried about my own safety whenever I went to visit Maggie at Bennington, though I had seen some pretty wild things in the hallways of the sanatorium. This was different, though. This was my baby's safety, too.

"Don't tell Diana, though. Not yet." I told Maggie. She was in the middle of giving me a hug, pulling me tight to her.

"Why not? It's her grandchild."

"I know, but they say to wait until the thirteenth week of pregnancy to tell people. To make sure nothing happens."

Maggie considered this and nodded. Then she said what we were both thinking, but neither of us wanted to say: "I don't think you should visit until after you have the baby."

"I know," I said, playing with the string on my hoodie. "I just didn't want to say it."

Except for when Maggie isn't doing well, there was never a time that I didn't visit my sister. Not even that time I broke my ankle playing football with Eric and our cousins one Thanksgiving.

"Don't say anything to mom or dad either," I told Maggie. I was not exactly looking forward to telling them about the baby.

"You know I won't. I think Dad will take it better than Mom, though." Maggie could not have been more right. But more on that later.

I pulled out the flimsy little sonogram picture I'd gotten from an appointment earlier that week. Dr. Prince let me come in again once Spencer was back from the Idaho case so that he could be there for it.

"You can't really see anything right now. The baby's just a little blob, but it's there." I circled where the baby was on the fuzzy photo with my fingertip.

"It's a cute little blob," Maggie said.

We both cried when the visiting hour was up because we knew it would be the last one for eight months.

I also told Isaac, but that was more because I'd run out of reasons why I couldn't take out the heavy trash like I used to.

"It's way passed your turn," Isaac said, swiping down the coffee counter while we were closing up the bookstore.

"Sorry, can't. Hash-slinging Slasher," I replied, using a SpongeBob character because I couldn't think of any other reason why I couldn't do it. Isaac burst out laughing despite being annoyed.

"That's the lamest reason you've come up with all week, even though it is by far the funniest. Why don't you tell me why you really won't do it? I know something's going on. You're being all secretive."

I took a deep breath. "Fine. I guess I can tell you, I mean I already told Maggie. Me and Spencer are having a baby. I'm pregnant, so I can't lift the heavy-ass trash every night."

"Wow, you're such an unmarried harlot. I'm going to get you a scarlet A," Isaac said in a faux-mocking tone. "Really, you thought you couldn't tell me that?"

"Well, there's a pretty decent chance this baby isn't exactly going to hit the genetic jackpot," I mumbled. I knew there was a big chance that our baby would inherit the genes for schizophrenia, the ones that Spencer and I had thus far dodged.

"Okay, yeah, but nobody ever really knows how their child will end up. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have a baby if that's what they want to do. And it's not like either of you wouldn't know what to do or how to handle it if your kid did have schizophrenia."

Isaac had a valid point. I knew he wouldn't judge me or Spencer for wanting the baby, but it still scared me to say it out loud.

Until the thirteenth week, when I absolutely had to tell my parents, the baby was a happy little secret of mine and Spencer's.

I will tell you what I can about telling my parents I was pregnant. I remember it all, believe me, I do. But putting it down on paper, even three years later, is not the most enjoyable experience.

My father did take it better than my mother, as Maggie had predicted. My mom… wasn't happy, to say the least. The first thing she said was, "You have to get an abortion."

When I told her I was twenty-one and didn't have to get an abortion if I didn't want one, she slapped me so hard that I wore the hand-shaped bruise on my face for over a week.

Dad was like I'd never seen him before. My father has always been a gentle person, never one inclined to violence. After my mother slapped me, though, he pushed her away from me and told her not to lay another hand on me or he'd call the cops.

"What can you do?" My mother said mockingly. "You heard her, she's twenty-one. She's not a child."

"She's not a child, but she's pregnant, and assault on a pregnant woman doesn't exactly look good on anyone's record."

From there it was like a domino effect. I didn't know, before then, that my parents' marriage wasn't going well. Neither did Eric apparently, because he would go on to tell me that he never knew they were fighting and that they always seemed happy.

What happened the day I told my parents I was pregnant was the catalyst for their divorce. It wasn't instantaneous or anything, but it came just two months after I told them. My father went with me to the bookstore after the slap. He immediately started packing my stuff.

"You need to get out of Montclair. Put some distance between you and what happened. Does Spencer still live in Quantico?"

"D.C., actually. He moved a few months ago." Spencer had finally found an apartment he liked.

Schroder seemed to sense that something was amiss, because he came running and meowing into the room to see what was going on.

"Is he working a case right now?" Dad asked as I bent to scoop Schroder into my arms.

"He's at work, but he's not on a case right now." I looked at the time on my cell phone. "He should be off in about an hour."

I didn't cry, despite the fact that my cheek and feelings were still stinging. I think I must have been in shock. Never in my life had either of my parents hit me, until that day. After that, things were just moving so fast, I could barely keep up with them let alone react to them.

So I let Dad pack enough of my stuff that I could reasonably move in with Spencer. He loaded it into my car and his own, and then he asked for my phone to call Spencer.

I actually don't know what Dad told Spencer that day, because he went back into my apartment to talk to him while I tried to convince Schroder to get in his pet carrier for the car ride. He hates that thing, but he also hates being outside of it when the car is moving. You just can't win travelling with Schroder, honestly.

So, yeah. That was the day I moved in with Spencer. Pretty eventful, huh? Like I said, I'm sure I was in shock. It wasn't until I was sitting on the couch with Schroder in my lap and a cup of tea Spencer made me—with too much sugar in it, of course—that it really hit me.

Even then, with the tears rolling down my cheeks, I still felt almost numb. I didn't think my mother would be exactly happy about the news, but what happened did not match the loving, smiling mother I'd known my whole life. This was something I never expected from her, but I guess it goes to show that sometimes you really don't know someone as well as you think you do. Even if that person is your mother.

"I think I'm going to go to bed," I told Spencer. It was only six o'clock.

"You should probably eat something first," he answered gently.

"Oh. Right." I didn't want to eat, but I knew I needed to, for the baby. So I made myself eat the entire grilled cheese with tomatoes Spencer made for me, and I drank a whole glass of water. Then I took Schroder with me and I went to bed.

In the morning I told Spencer I didn't want to go to class that day. Or any day, until the bruise on my face went away.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," he said, pausing in the buttoning up of his shirt to give me a kiss on my unmarked cheek.

After Spencer went to work, I took an extremely long bath. I stayed in the water until it turned cold, with Schroder sitting on the bathroom ledge. I had a lot to think about.

Did I still have a job at the bookstore? I had forgotten to ask Dad. Would I finish school? I was pretty sure I could, because my parents always paid the tuition in full at the beginning of the year. Plus, thanks to a lot of dual-credit classes I took in high school, I was in my last year of college for an undergraduate degree.

When the water was too cold and I had started to shiver, I got out and put on one of Spencer's t-shirts and some leggings. At roughly thirteen weeks, I was showing just the tiniest bit. I went into the kitchen and ate some cereal, because I knew I needed to. I still didn't have much of an appetite.

I paced around the apartment, Schroder close at my heels. He hadn't left me since the day before. He seemed happy with our move, though, if only because it involved Spencer.

The apartment Spencer had gotten was, thankfully, two-bedroom. I didn't want to ask him to move, because he really loved the area around the apartment. It was pure luck that the first available apartment had two bedrooms.

I walked the floor of the second bedroom, which at that time was empty and cold. It would be a nursery soon enough, though.

"We'll have to paint in here," I told Schroder, picking him up and cuddling him to my chest. "I just don't know what color yet."

I was trying to find tasks to keep my mind off the heaviness I felt in my chest. I felt almost abandoned, even though I knew I still had Spencer, Isaac, Maggie, my father…I wasn't sure then, but I guessed I'd have Eric on my side, too. He was seventeen and rebellious; his love for the guitar had turned into a passion for playing in punk garage bands that our mother detested. He'd be on my side if only to make her mad.

I didn't know what else to do, so I started cleaning. I hadn't thought to get my guitar, and obviously I didn't take the piano with me, so I didn't have anything like teaching myself a new song to distract me. Cleaning had to do, and let me tell you, I cleaned the whole apartment before Spencer got home from work.

"Who are you, Cinderella?" He teased when he got home, handing me a little carton of Chinese takeout. Spencer is_ not_ culinary-inclined, and I almost smiled at his attempt at dinner.

"Do you need me to tie your chopsticks together with a rubber band?" I asked. Spencer is terrible with chopsticks. I don't think he could use them to save his life.

Spencer smiled and kissed me. "I'm going to visit my mom this weekend, to tell her. You don't have to come if you don't want to, though."

I shook my head. I had already told Maggie I wasn't going to Bennington until after the baby was born, and it wouldn't be fair to visit Diana and not Maggie. We had already decided I would just call her every week instead, and so far that had been working.

Besides that, I didn't feel like going anywhere.

"Have you told the team yet?" I asked, but Spencer shook his head, his mouth full of orange chicken.

"Not yet," he said once he had swallowed. "But I promise they'll be happy."

I nodded and ate until I thought Spencer would be satisfied.

The next day I didn't get out of bed at all, and Spencer didn't question it. He brought me tea, toast, and a stack of books before leaving for work. When he got home, he talked me into taking a bath and coming out of the bedroom for a little while.

I spent every day more or less like this for about a week, until the bruise faded away. And then Spencer tried to convince me to go back to school, but it took him enlisting the help of Isaac to pretty much force me to go.

Schizophrenia has always been the mental illness that I fear, but unbeknownst to me at the time, I was experiencing a bout of something Dr. Prince would later call antepartum depression.


	16. Entry Sixteen

In hindsight, it's really easy for me to see how I became depressed. For one thing, I was separated from Maggie—this had already happened in life when we were children, and I had become depressed then, too. If you know anything about twins, you should know that they are _extremely _dependent on each other.

For another thing, I was completely unable to reconcile the mother who had looked me in the eye and slapped me with the mother who used to let me drink hot chocolate from her heirloom china and eat sugar cookies off her cut crystal. Or from the mother who laid in bed with me for three days because I had the flu. Or the mother who got me a kitten, my sweet Schroder, when I graduated high school because I'd always wanted one but Eric is allergic.

The two didn't make sense, and I didn't want to think about it, so I tried to push it out of my mind. I also didn't let myself feel it, because I had read that great emotional upset could lead to miscarriage.

That was something I feared more than anything. I was allowing myself to have this unplanned baby, but I wasn't sure I could let myself knowingly get pregnant. I could _not _lose this baby. So I numbed myself as much as I possibly could to the whole situation.

It made me feel a little better when Spencer told me how excited Diana was, as did the flowers Penelope sent me along with a note with about twenty exclamation marks. Knowing they—Spencer's mother and the team—were excited for us helped me feel a little more validated.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel the sting of my mother's slap long after the bruise faded.

Bless Spencer, though, he tried so hard. He called Dr. Prince and asked what I needed to be eating and went grocery shopping. Spencer made sure there was enough in the apartment for when he would be away at work.

"You need to eat at least three times a day," he told me, bending to kiss the crown of my head as he got ready for work.

"I know," I told him, smiling because despite it all it made me happy to see him so involved.

"And make sure to eat a variety of things, even things you don't like. It helps prevent the baby from developing allergies because the exposure in the womb builds immunity."

I held back my laugh, because I knew he was talking about nuts. I am _not _a fan of nuts, but Spencer had made little baggies of the exact recommended serving size from a bag of mixed nuts and he insisted I eat them every day. He was worried if I didn't, the baby would develop a nut allergy, which are notoriously dangerous.

"Go to class," he told me. "It's not good for you to sit in bed all day unless you're actually on bedrest. The baby needs blood flow."

I did go to class, as much as I didn't want to. I didn't really have a choice, since Isaac went out of his way to drive from Montclair every day I had class to drag me to class. Besides that, I _did _lay in bed a lot. I just didn't have the motivation or the will to do much besides lay in bed. Or lay in the bathtub, which had become my other hobby.

For nearly two months, my days looked like this:

On class days, Isaac would come collect me and usually bring a bribe of cookies or a soda, because both were things Spencer didn't think I should have too much of. After class I would come back home and either lay in bed or on the couch or in the bathtub; no matter where I went, Schroder wasn't far behind.

When I didn't have class, it wasn't likely I would leave bed except for one thing: walking the hallway. I would do that because I knew I needed to move, to get the blood flowing, just as Spencer said. I'm surprised the carpet in the hallway didn't get a rut in it from how often I'd walk up and down it.

On days Spencer didn't work, he would convince me to leave the apartment and take me to museums and art galleries, the library, grocery shopping, to tiny hole-in-the-wall cafes. Anything to get me up for a little while.

I was dragging my feet, and I knew it. Just like I knew Spencer was coddling me and letting me wallow around. I should have been preparing for the baby—I was already nearing the halfway point in my pregnancy.

It all changed the twentieth week of my pregnancy. That was the first time I felt Paige move.

I was laying on the couch, like I often did, Schroder curled up by my feet. Spencer was in the kitchen, warming up some leftovers. I was watching documentaries on the Discovery Channel when I felt something stir in my stomach. It was like a tiny flutter and it surprised me enough to sit up.

Amazed, I pushed gently against my stomach, which was starting to round out. A few seconds after I pushed my fingertips just to the left of my belly button, I felt the flutter again. I stood up, much to Schroder's chagrin, and rushed to the kitchen.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Spencer asked, but I just smiled wide at him and took his hand.

"Feel this!" I all but shouted because I was so excited. I pressed Spencer's hand against my stomach and applied a little pressure. Moments later, the baby moved again, pressing back against the spot I'd pushed Spencer's hand.

I knew from Spencer's wonderstruck expression that he'd felt it, too. He laughed and kissed me on the mouth, both of us smiling wide.

When we went to bed that night, we laid there for a long time, Spencer's hand on my belly while the baby wriggled. She was an extremely active baby after that day, moving all the time.

Paige's movements in my belly inspired me into motion. Instead of staying in bed the day after, I went out to the baby store Spencer had pointed out to me but neither of us had visited yet. I sent him pictures of cribs and dressers, car seats and baby swings.

It was like I was woken up from a hazy dream and suddenly I was excited for the baby. I didn't have time to think about how shamed I still felt from my mother's slap or how badly I missed Maggie. I had things to do. I had a baby to prepare for.

The twenty-second week of my pregnancy, I found out our baby was going to be a girl. Spencer did _not _find out, though—he wanted it to be a surprise.

"Don't tell me. I know you want to tell, but don't tell me," Spencer told me in the waiting room while I was flipping through a magazine.

"Fine, but you're going to have to use some pretty good self-control. The decorating of the nursery begins after today," I told him. Penelope had already volunteered herself to be my decorator, so she was going to know the sex of the baby, too.

"Garcia can't say anything, either! She has to keep a secret for once."

"I will swear her to secrecy," I promised.

I got a little envelope with the sex written on a piece of paper inside after the sonogram since Spencer didn't want to know. I folded it and put it in my pocket, keeping it to open when Spencer wasn't with me so I wouldn't tell him out of excitement.

I needed to know, because I'm a perfectionist planner and it would have driven me crazy not knowing. Spencer, on the other hand, thought that not knowing was half of the fun.

I waited until Spencer was out with Derek and Hotch, then I invited Penelope over. We went into the nursery, which Spencer was going to be banned from as soon as we started decorating, to open the envelope.

"Here, you open it," I told Penelope, shoving the envelope to her. I put a hand on my growing belly. "I'm too nervous."

I stood and waited for Penelope to open the envelope. She pulled out a plain, white piece of paper and unfolded it so only she could see. Then she let out a loud, high-pitched squeal.

"A girl!" she yelled. "We're finally going to have a girl!"

Hotch only had a son and JJ was due to have a little boy very soon. I felt my smile grow so wide I'm surprised it didn't split my face. If it weren't for the fear of shaking the baby up, I would have been jumping in place in excitement like Penelope was.

Believe me, it didn't take long for Penelope to start decorating. We picked out a pale lavender shade of paint and Penelope spent all of her free time at mine and Spencer's apartment until she finished the paint job. Spencer and I picked out wooden baby furniture painted white; this was the only part of the decorating he was allowed in on, since he didn't want to know the sex of the baby.

"We should probably do this," Spencer said one day, handing me a book of baby names before climbing into bed with me. I felt the baby moving around—for some reason, she became more active when I would sit or lay down.

"Yeah, we should," I said with a laugh.

We flipped through that book looking through names. Spencer made a list. Eventually, we settle on Paige for a girl and Luke for a boy. But only I knew that Paige would be the name we would use. From that day forward, my thoughts turned from 'the baby' to 'Paige', already trying her name on for size.


	17. Entry Seventeen

I had never heard Spencer speak a word about his father until we were expecting Paige. I only knew that he had left when Spencer was a young boy because Diana had mentioned it to me once. That changed when the BAU team was working a case that Spencer believed his father had something to do with.

As with so many things that go on in Spencer's work life, I didn't get to hear about it until after the fact when it was all resolved.

Even before the case, I knew _something _was up with Spencer. He kept waking up at night, his sleep interrupted by dreams. His getting out of bed would wake me up.

"You need rest," he would tell me, when I would get out of bed to sit up with him.

"Pssh, not really. It's not like I do a whole lot all day." I still hadn't returned to work at the bookstore—Dad promised I could, but he knew I didn't really need the money and he insisted I wait until after I had the baby and had finished school to return to helping him with the store.

I knew things weren't going well with him and my mother. It was to the point where he had served her divorce papers.

Dad didn't ever answer any of my questions about my mother. He always ignored them and carried on the conversation like I hadn't asked. The only source of intel I had was Eric, but that was only when he could be bothered to text me back… which wasn't often. He was such a teenager.

"Tell me what's going on in that head of yours," I would tell Spencer as I made us some tea. Caffeine free, of course; a certain someone had cut me off from caffeine when he found out it wasn't exactly the best for prenatal development.

"I keep having these weird dreams…but I'm not really sure they're dreams. I think they might actually be memories." Spencer told me about his dreams, which involved JJ's soon-to-be-born son going missing, about a little boy going missing and not being able to find him.

I remember placing a hand on my stomach, the mere thought of something like that terrifying me. My heart didn't calm down until I felt Paige push back against the weight of my hand.

Spencer became almost obsessed with these dreams, and he eventually formed a theory that his father, William Reid, was involved in some unresolved murder cases that happened in Spencer's hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada. Like I said, I didn't know any of this was going on until Spencer came home from the case. All I knew was that he was in Las Vegas.

Our conversation when Spencer got home went a little like this:

"Hey, how'd the case go?" I had asked, moving Schroder quickly off the coffee table where he loved to lay though Spencer disapproved. I let Schroder lay wherever he wants when Spencer isn't home. He's my first baby, I can't say no to him.

"I accused my father of being a murderer," Spencer had answered, throwing his 'go bag' and the satchel he always took to work in our bedroom.

"What?!" Spencer had never even made a mention of his father before then.

He came to sit on the couch with me and tell me all about what happened. How he thought his father, who he had not seen in thirteen years, was involved in some open cases. How he had convinced Diana to help him with the case. How he met with his father. About the conversation that followed.

"I talked to him, after I realized he didn't have anything to do with the case." I was still shocked by everything, so I sat and waited for Spencer to continue. "I told him about you, and the baby."

Spencer kind of smiled sheepishly. "I may have gotten a little angry. I told him I'd never be like him, that I'd never leave my child. He wasn't too happy about that."

He looked away from me, retreating into his own mind and staring hard at the wall. I quickly changed the subject for him before he could become too upset.

"I'm sorry that happened," I told him. "But there is some good news recently. JJ's baby is healthy, and he's really cute. She named him Henry. Me and Penelope went and saw them while you were still away."

Henry was a cute little baby. He looked more like JJ than he did Will LaMontagne, JJ's boyfriend. He had a sweet little face and a fine dusting of JJ's blonde hair across his head.

Spencer smiled and asked, "Did it make you excited?"

I had to laugh, because it had actually had the opposite effect on me.

"Newborns are kind of scary," I confessed. "I felt like I was going to break him. And I wouldn't let JJ tell me anything about actually having him."

I was really excited for the part where Paige would actually be here, but the closer it got to having to go into labor, the more nervous I got. I wasn't planning on giving up my stance on painkillers.

Seeing his father again after so many years stayed with Spencer for a while.

"It's really made him worried he won't be a good father," I told Isaac and Penelope. Isaac was sprawled out on our couch, watching _America's Next Top Model_, while Penelope and I were painting some wooden letters to hang in Paige's nursery. The letters were her initials: P. D. R.

"Anyone who can keep Schroder happy for longer than two seconds will be a great parent," Isaac said, tapping Schroder, who was laying at the end of the couch, with his foot. Spencer was giving a weekend lecture with the BAU's new team member, David Rossi. He had taken Gideon's place.

"Schroder isn't _that_ demanding," I said, watching Penelope outline the wooden _P_ with little pearl-like beads.

"What other cat gets treats first thing in the morning?" Isaac asked. I rolled my eyes and ignored him.

"I don't know why he's so worried," Penelope said. "You should have seen him holding Henry when JJ brought him to the BAU. He totally lit up."

"Hey, what's your kid's middle name going to be, anyway?" Isaac asked, looking over at what we were doing. I hadn't told anyone that I planned on Paige's middle name being Diana. It was a surprise for Spencer. I was surprised, with both of them knowing that his mother's name is Diana, neither of them had figured it out.

"Wait until she's born," I told him and he stuck his tongue out at me.

"I think seeing his father just kind of freaked him out," I admitted.

"Which is understandable. I mean, he hadn't seen the man in over a decade," Penelope said.

Spencer didn't mention the case after that one conversation, but I could tell he was worried. He still wouldn't go in the nursery, because that would tip him off that we were having a girl, but he became very interested in making sure we had everything we needed for when the baby came.

Actually, it all came out in one big, long stream of questions one day while we were doing dishes.

"Do we have a car seat? Are we going to give the baby pacifiers? I've read a lot of conflicting opinions on those. You read that article I circled for you, right? About how it's best if babies sleep on their back? Do we have bottles? Do we even need bottles, or are you going to breast feed?"

The questions were fast and furious and I couldn't get a word in edgewise. I was drying the dishes, but I put the plate down and dunked my hands in the soapy water with Spencer's so I could take hold of his hands.

"Hey, slow down Speed Racer. Yes, we have a car seat. I don't really have an opinion on pacifiers either way. Yes, I read the article. I read all the articles you leave circled for me. And yes we do have some bottles, though I am going to try to breast feed but not every woman can so I got bottles just in case. Any other questions, or do you need to compose a list?"

Spencer chuckled at himself and leaned down to kiss me.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound crazy just now. I'm just…"

"Worried?" I finished for him, smiling. "Scared? Don't worry, I get that way, too."

"I didn't realize there was so much you have to prepare for until I read all your books and magazines."

"You already read _all _of them? Wait, don't answer that. I forgot I'm living with a genius who has an insanely fast reading speed."

That brought a blush to Spencer's cheeks that made me smile.

"I know it's a lot," I told him. "But don't worry. I've got it under control. I actually do have a list. If you weren't so stubborn about not wanting to know the sex of the baby, I would have let you see it," I teased.

"I like the idea of the surprise," Spencer said with a shrug.

"I know, but I promise everything is going fine currently and will be fine in the future. Maybe the ultrasound this weekend will make you feel better. The baby's a lot bigger now, so we'll actually have something to look at other than a squirmy little blob."

I was close to six months pregnant. My stomach was really starting to round out, but I'd been lucky enough to avoid the backaches and sore feet JJ had at this point during her pregnancy. The fact that I wasn't working probably helped a lot with that. I knew I was lucky to get to take it easy aside from my schoolwork.

Since my belly was getting bigger, and Paige moved around so much, playing the guitar was getting to be a bit tricky. Playing any kind of music has always been a huge stress reliever for me. I prefer my piano, but that was all the way at the bookstore. Besides, I love guitar, too, so it wasn't a huge deal.

First of all, it was getting harder to balance the guitar on my lap with my belly getting in the way. Second of all, Paige hated both the pressure of the guitar and the vibrations brought on by playing it.

After we had finished doing the dishes, I sat down to play guitar while Spencer read. As soon as I got the guitar settled on my lap, Paige began kicking against it. She was still too little then to have much force behind her kicks, but I could feel them nonetheless.

"Deal with it," I told her. Spencer chuckled from his place sprawled out on the couch. Schroder was curled up on his stomach.

"Fighting already? The baby isn't even born."

"The baby hates the guitar," I told him. It was hard to call Paige 'the baby' when I already referred to her by name in my own thinking and in my conversations with Penelope and Isaac.

"You're just going to have to get used to it," I said, speaking to my belly again. "It's not going to go away, not even when you come out."

Spencer laughed at us some more. Paige began to do somersaults of protest as I strummed the guitar.

* * *

A/N: Hey, guys! So I realized, while looking through my drafts, that I randomly started spelling Gwen's cat's name as 'Schroder' whereas it was previously 'Schroeder'. I'm kind of too lazy to go back and change all the mistakes in favor of either spelling, so from here on out we're just going to go with Schroder as the spelling! Sorry if anyone else caught that and it's been bugging them. I hope you enjoyed the chapter!


	18. Entry Eighteen

Since visits to Bennington were out of the question while I was pregnant with Paige, I had to make do with phone calls with Maggie. It wasn't the same, but it was the best we could do.

Maggie was even more in the dark than I was about our parent's divorce.

"I haven't seen Mom lately," Maggie mused one Sunday during our phone calls. While we talked, I was balancing the TV remote on my stomach and waiting for Paige to kick it off. I was starting to feel huge as I approached my eighth month.

"Yeah, me neither," I said noncommittally. I hadn't told Maggie about what our mother had done and said when I told them I was pregnant.

"I wonder what's going on," I could tell by the way Maggie said it that she knew I knew more than I was saying.

"Beats me. Ask Eric, he'd know more than we do." Maggie sighed on the other end and changed the subject.

"You should see how excited Diana is," she told me. "She'll talk the ear off of anyone who will listen that she's going to be a grandmother. She's dying to know if it's a boy or a girl, but she says Spencer doesn't want to know."

"You haven't told her, have you?" I asked, watching the TV remote slide down the slope of my belly thanks to Paige's kicks.

"Nope, I told her you won't tell me, either. I can't believe Spencer doesn't want to know."

I laughed. "He thinks it will be a fun surprise."

"It's boring without you visiting. Mr. Webber has been complaining about his lack of Sunday music." Often, when I would visit Bennington, I would bring my guitar and Maggie and I would play music together.

Music had always been therapeutic for Maggie, as had my weekly visits. I think it helped keep her in control of the schizophrenia. She had done better than I expected so far, but we still had a ways to go.

"How much longer will you be pregnant?" Maggie asked, and her voice sounded small. I know it sounds weird, but I felt kind of guilty, because I couldn't visit. Not until the baby was born.

"Around ten weeks," I told Maggie. "Just until February." Paige was due February 22nd. It was December at the time, and though Christmas was a week away, I knew there wouldn't be any visits anywhere this year. It would be just me and Spencer. Well, and Schroder, if he ever decided to leave his favorite branch in the Christmas tree.

"That's a long way," Maggie said sullenly. I felt the same way, both in regards of getting to see my sister and getting to meet my baby.

"I know," I agreed. I was worried that without the visits, without a tie to the outside world, Maggie was going to slip. She didn't do well with isolation. It was some kind of miracle that she'd made it to seven months without one break.

Bennington let us stay on the phone for the same amount of time that they allowed face-to-face visits. Which, if you asked me, was not fair—it wasn't like there was any danger of a schizophrenic break over a telephone line.

When Maggie and I had said our goodbyes, I went back to what I was doing before our weekly phone call: Watching Dr. Who and folding laundry. Spencer _loves_ Dr. Who, but I had never heard of it before I started dating Spencer. I was woefully behind in the series, so I was trying to catch up.

Folding Spencer's laundry is incredibly easy, because I never have to find matching socks. I can just pick them up and put them together however. If one half of the pair ever goes missing, no big deal.

"It's bad luck to wear matching socks," Spencer told me once when I asked him. It's one of my favorite quirks of his.

Spencer was taking a nap. He had a day off, but work had been weighing heavy on him lately. He wouldn't tell me much, only that it had to do with someone who was bothering Hotch.

"It happens, in our work," Spencer had told me earlier, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "Don't worry about it."

But I could see it was getting to him. I could see it in the shake in his hands, which had returned under the stress. I bought stronger coffee the last time I went to the store, hoping the extra caffeine would help calm his nerves and suppress the dilaudid cravings. He didn't have to tell me they had come back; I could see it in his eyes.

I finished the laundry and put it away before crawling in bed with Spencer. He was just waking up, pushing some wayward curls out of his eyes.

"Hi," I whispered to him. It was shadowy in our room, but not completely dark.

"Hey," he whispered back, his hand coming to rest on my stomach as he rolled on his side to face me.

"How'd you sleep?" I asked. Both of us had issues with insomnia from time to time, and Spencer's had recently come back.

"It was good. How's your sister?"

"I think she's doing okay. She said Diana talks about the baby a lot."

A sleepy smile came across Spencer's face.

"She's always asking about the baby in her letters. She makes me tell her everything I know, even though she gets really frustrated that I don't know if it's a boy or a girl."

"Well, you _could_ know," I reminded him, but he shook his head against his pillow. He was still so adamant about not knowing.

"I'll know in two months," he said simply. "How are your feet?"

Already my feet had started to grow achy and occasionally swollen. I knew it was only going to get worse when I got closer to my due date, but I didn't care. I was happy as long as our baby was healthy.

"They're okay. I was hoping you'd still be asleep. I was going to join your little nap," I told him. He smiled lazily again.

"I could sleep some more."

In retrospect, I can say that I'm happy that my father told me to take it easy during the pregnancy. At the time I was annoyed that he kept me in the dark about things with my mother and that he wouldn't let me work at the bookstore. I was soon grateful that, for the majority of my pregnancy, I was fortunate enough to have it be mostly stress-free.

Christmas passed happily. There was a celebration dinner courtesy of Spencer's coworker David Rossi, who is an excellent cook. Seriously, David's food is the best food I've ever had. We passed around baby Henry and he got plenty of love and kisses. An official bet was taken on what the gender of mine and Spencer's baby would be, and Penelope was _not _allowed to cast a vote.

The general consensus was that we'd have a boy, because that's what Hotch and JJ had.

Things began changing quickly, though, thanks to a man who was called The Reaper. The turning point was a case that left both Spencer and Hotch in the hospital.

Actually, the details of the case don't really matter. They certainly didn't matter to me, anyway. All I cared about was the fact that Spencer had been shot in the leg during it. I was eight months pregnant by then—it was mid-January—and I was too far along to fly. So after Spencer's phone call, all I could do was sit and wait.

"Please try to stay calm. You can't get too worked up," Spencer had told me. He didn't have a chance to call me until he had already been treated. The bullet was removed easily, but he'd have to be on crutches and wouldn't be allowed to fly until the injury healed.

"I know, I know," I said, cradling my head in my hands. He was right, though. If I got too worked up, I could go into labor early and that would not be ideal.

"I love you. I'm fine, just relax. Everything will be okay."

"I love you too. Tell me when they let you come back to D.C."

Hotch's hospitalization was part of a bigger ploy by The Reaper. He injured Hotch, used Derek's credentials to drop him off at the hospital, and hinted that he was going to go after Hotch's son, Jack, and his ex-wife, Hailey.

Hailey and Jack had to go into protective custody. Spencer waited until he was back in D.C.

"He hasn't indicated he's going to target anyone other than Hotch," Spencer said. I handed him a bowl of baked potato soup. He was sitting on the couch, giving his poor leg a rest. "But I wanted you to know. Just in case."

His eyes lingered on my belly. I could tell he was more scared than he was letting on.

"It will all be okay," I told Spencer, smoothing his hair and kissing his forehead. "I think I'll feel better when…the baby is here, though." I almost slipped.

Spencer smirked. "Nice save. I will, too, though."

"We're gonna get stuck eventually, I hope you know. I haven't been able to get off the couch without help for a month, and now you're just the same."

"I'll be fine as long as my crutches are close by. You, on the other hand…You're just going to have to succumb to your fate."


	19. Entry Nineteen

The Reaper's real name was George Foyet. I say 'was' because that bastard rightfully died.

In the first week of February, he killed Hailey. He would have killed Jack, too, had Hotch not got there in time.

Hotch beat him to death. With his bare hands. I do not consider this murder in the slightest—it was pure, unadulterated justice.

Nobody can ever say Hotch didn't love Hailey.

* * *

Let me tell you something: Babies come when they want to come. They do not care if they are two and a half weeks early. They do not care if their father is in Washington State, because their mother dumbly told him to go on the case, that everything would be fine.

It was the very first case Spencer was back on after his doctor cleared him to fly. The wound had healed enough that the altitude wouldn't bother it. He still had to walk with a cane, but it was easier than the crutches.

"You should go," I told Spencer. "I know you've been itching to get out of Penelope's computer room."

Hotch had been making Spencer stay behind, with Penelope, while the other team members flew out to the location of the cases. I knew Spencer didn't like it, that he felt like he wasn't really doing his job unless he was actually there. So I told him to go.

"You're sure?" He asked, worry clear on his face.

"Positive. We will be fine," I promised him.

This was a promise I could not keep.

Let me tell you something else: back labor is a thing. _Nobody _told me that. So when I woke up with back pains in the middle of the night the day before I told Spencer to go on the case, I had no idea that was the beginning of labor. I didn't feel any cramping or pain in my stomach at first, only in my back, and I didn't think anything of it.

Until my water broke _one hour exactly_ after Spencer and the team had left for Washington.

Do you know how long it takes to fly to Washington from Virginia? A little over five hours. Which means to fly _back_ to Virginia would be another five hours. I wasn't sure I would even have ten hours before Paige was born.

I called Penelope. Isaac was a no—he was thoroughly freaked out by all things pregnancy, so him being in the birthing room was not going to happen. I also didn't want to call Dad, because I thought that would be awkward. And I didn't have the option of calling my mother.

Penelope was the only person I could think of.

"Hi," I told her. I was getting pains in my stomach by then, and it was not fun. "Wanna do me a favor?"

That was all I had to say. She caught on instantly.

"_No_. You're joking! They just took off!"

"Yeah, I _know_. But my water just broke, and I can't exactly just cross my legs and wait for Spencer to be back."

"Oh my God," Penelope said. "They're going to have to land in Washington and Reid will have to come right back. Oh my God. He's not going to make it."

"Neither am I if I don't go to the hospital!" I didn't mean to be snappy, but it hurt so bad. It hurt bad enough that I was actually questioning my no-pain-meds stance.

I didn't call Spencer until I had been admitted, evaluated, and told I was already dilated to a six.

"Dammit," he said. Spencer hardly ever cusses, so this was a big deal, and I would have teased him had I been feeling better. "What if I'm not back in time?"

"It will be okay," I told him. "Penelope is here, at least."

But I knew it was going to eat him up if he did miss it. Which he did. But I fully blame myself for that, not him.

I will spare you all the gory details. Just know there was a lot of crying and I bought Penelope a lava lamp when all was said and done because I felt bad for crushing her hand. I did _not_ use pain medicine, though! I am woman, hear me roar.

She was so perfect. I couldn't stop staring at her. Instead of laying her in the little plastic bassinet they placed beside my hospital bed, I had Paige laid out on the end of my bed. I was sitting cross legged on the upper half, just watching her sleep.

Her hair was curly, even on that first day. Curly like Spencer's, and redder than mine. Whereas mine was more auburn, subdued by some brown undertones, Paige's was a deep, rich red. She had a lot of hair for a newborn, but me and my siblings were all born with hair, so I wasn't too surprised. When she opened her eyes, they were reflections of Spencer's: a warm brown that felt like home.

Paige slept so peacefully, making little sighing noises. When she did wake up, she didn't cry. She looked around her like she was inspecting things and she would make cooing noises when I picked her up, but she didn't cry. She did cry earlier, when she was born, but only until they handed her to me, and then Paige quieted immediately like she already knew who I was.

Paige Diana. That is the name we picked out for a girl, though only I knew that was the name we were going to use for sure. Spencer still had no idea if our baby was a boy or a girl-when Penelope had called him for me because my hands were shaking too much after it all, he wouldn't let her tell him the sex of the baby.

Speaking of Penelope, she was crashed out in one of the arm chairs. All three of us needed sleep, but I couldn't. I was so scared I would miss something if I went to sleep, if I took my eyes off of Paige. And I wanted to be awake when Spencer finally made it in.

I knew it was killing Spencer that he missed the whole thing. But we knew this was a possibility, and I had been telling him for months that it would be okay, that we would be okay, if it happened when he was gone.

And we were okay. We had Penelope here and Paige was perfect and healthy.

I was marveling over the rose shade of Paige's bow shaped lips when there was the lightest knock on the door.

"Spencer!" I said in a whisper-shout, not wanting to wake neither Paige nor Penelope. "Come here!"

I opened my arms wide, waiting for him to come close enough to hug. I would have ran to him if I could, I was so excited for him to see our daughter. But the last time I had stood up, my legs were so weak I nearly fell. Penelope had to help me to the bathroom.

I hugged Spencer as best as I could when he was close enough and he pressed a kiss on my temple before turning to the swaddle of pink before me.

"A girl..." He said, a wobble in his voice.

"Our girl," I said, carefully picking her up. Paige jumped a little but did not wake. "Paige Diana Reid."

Spencer sat in the arm chair to the left of the bed, since Penelope had the right one. I made him sit down before placing her in Spencer's arms. I think both of us were a little worried, with his cane and all.

"You gave her my last name?" Spencer asked as I placed Paige in his arms. We weren't married, but it had never crossed my mind to write Harper instead of Reid on that birth certificate.

"Of course I did, silly," I leaned over the railing on the bed to kiss his cheek. "She's yours, too."

I wiped the tears off Spencer's face as he smiled down at our tiny little daughter.

"And her middle name. I didn't know you were going to do that."

"Well, surprise," I told him.

"She's so pretty," Spencer said in a reverent whisper. "Why is she so pretty?"

"Well, she does have my DNA," I joked.

I have a picture of us like that. Spencer in that ugly armchair, Paige in his arms. Me leaning over the bar on the hospital bed to run a finger over Paige's red curls. Both of us smiling down at our perfect, tiny daughter. Penelope _did _wake up when Spencer came in, and she sneaked the photo.

It's one of my favorite things in the whole world.


	20. Entry Twenty

My sweet little Paige. Oh, God, there is nothing like a new baby. She was so tiny—she only weighed a little over six pounds when she was born. I was just in such awe over her, unable to do anything other than marvel over her silky red curls and her pink cheeks and sweet little bow-shaped lips.

I know Spencer was the same, and I know this because he wasn't even reciting any off-the-wall facts about babies. He was just looking at her, running his fingers over her curls and smiling when she would wake up and look at him.

"Did you know your baby has a dent in her head?" Isaac asked when he visited. I smacked his hand before he could touch it.

"Stop that," I said.

"Babies are born with unfused skulls, so that their brain can continue to grow and develop after birth. That 'dent' is called a soft spot, and it's exposed brain matter. Touching it in a rough manner can cause harm to the brain," Spencer told Isaac.

"So don't touch the 'dent'," I followed up with.

Isaac looked down at Paige, nestled in his arms and asleep. "Babies are so weird."

I think seeing the baby made Hotch really sad, which was understandable. He had just lost Hailey not that long ago. Still, even though it looked like he was going to cry, he told Spencer that he had pulled some strings and gotten _him_ maternity leave so he could spend some time home with me and Paige.

"Pretty _and _guaranteed to be a genius. No one's gonna be ready for you, little momma," Derek told Paige when it was his turn to hold her.

"Basically, we're already best friends. I was here when she was born, but _someone _wouldn't let me hold her until after Spencer had a turn." Penelope told him, while giving me a teasing look. JJ and Spencer's newest team member, Emily Prentiss, came together with little Henry in tow.

JJ laid Henry in the little plastic basinet with Paige once he fell asleep. Since he was a few months older, he was bigger than Paige. They fit comfortably, though, laying on their backs with their heads turned towards each other.

"Her first solid food will have to be Italian. She needs to know the good things in life," Rossi said when he stopped by.

Eric was scared to hold her. Just seventeen, he'd never been around a baby. He would only hold her for a few seconds before he made me take her back.

"I'll hold her more when she's not so breakable," he said with a nervous laugh. "I guess it's pretty cool to say I'm an uncle, though."

Hotch may have been able to hold back his tears, but my dad wasn't able to. He cried quite a bit, not that I could blame him. So had Spencer and I.

"She's very beautiful," he told me. He brought his digital camera and took some pictures. I hadn't even realized it was a Sunday until he spoke again.

"I'm going to print these off, then pay Maggie a visit. I'll print enough to give some to your mother, too, Spencer."

Spencer thanked him and gave him the latest letter he'd written for Diana, which was on the hospital's stationary—he wrote it while watching Paige sleep.

We got to take Paige home that day, which was an adventure in and of itself. Eric wasn't the only one scare of hurting Paige. Spencer was, too, and he watched in suspense as I changed Paige out of the little pink-striped hospital gown and into the going-home outfit Penelope had bought her.

"You're really not scared?" Spencer asked. I was doing up the buttons on the bottom of the onesie I was dressing Paige in.

"No. As long as you support her head for her, she's fine," I told him.

Paige had woken up when I started dressing her. She started stretching her arms and kicking her legs, like she was trying them out. While she kicked and stretched, she looked around until she found Spencer and she smiled. Spencer smiled back and placed his finger in her tiny hand so that she curled her fingers around it.

I know what nurses say. Newborns don't smile, it's just gas, blah blah blah. But I also know that smiling is a human instinct, because even those who are born blind smile. And I know that Paige smiled from the get go.

She smiled at me and she smiled at Spencer, probably because she recognized our voices from when she was in the womb.

"Paige Diana Reid," Spencer said as Paige squeezed his finger in her hand. "I can't believe she's real."

"Oh, but she is. The best part is we get to keep her," I said, clipping a white bow into her curls. "She's gonna have wild hair."

Driving home was an adventure. Spencer is a self-taught driver, which makes sense. He was already in college by the time he was old enough to drive, and obviously Diana wasn't a suitable teacher. Even though the roads were clear of snow, a rarity in February, every turn made my stomach flip with worry. We made it fine, by some grace of God.

Schroder was on us immediately, weaving himself through our legs and crying.

"Oh, yeah. I'm sorry, Schrody. I forgot to tell you I'd be gone for two days."

Penelope did set out more than enough food and water for him, but he'd been hiding under the couch when I left.

He followed us to our bedroom, meowing. We had a bassinet in our room, beside the bed. Both of us had agreed we should keep the baby close until she was old enough to sleep through the night.

I laid Paige in the bassinet. She was asleep, and we needed to unpack from the hospital. Not only that, but I was hoping her nap would be long enough that I could sleep a little, too.

Once Paige was settled, I lifted Schroder up and let him peer into the bassinet. He sniffed and sniffed Paige's head and then, apparently in approval, he gave her forehead a lick.

"Cats smother babies," Spencer told me.

"That's an old wives' tale. He likes her." And he did. I could feel Schroder purring in my hands as he sniffed Paige out.

"How are you feeling?" Spencer asked me.

"Dirty," I said with a laugh. "Would you be okay in here with her if I took a shower?"

"I think we'll be fine," Spencer said, taking a seat on the bed and petting Schroder.

I was amazed by how sore _everything_ felt. Even my arms ached. The hot water felt nice, though, and it was surreal to be able to see all the way down to my feet again. My body was nowhere near what it had been like before pregnancy, but it was interesting to me that my belly was no longer extended without a baby in it. Now it was soft, without someone taking up extra room in it.

I washed all the sweat off my skin and out of my hair. When I was clean, I stayed under the stream of water and just enjoyed how it felt for a while. I put on clean pajamas.

"I'm going to try to nap while she's still asleep," I told Spencer once I was back in the room. "It was awful trying to sleep in the hospital."

"Those lights over the bed are annoying, huh?" Spencer asked, pulling back the covers for me to slide into.

"Extremely so." Spencer tucked the blankets around me and kissed first my forehead and then Paige's. He pulled the curtains closed and dimmed the light.

"I'll get us something to eat when you wake up."

I guess Paige was tired, too, because she didn't make a peep until the late afternoon. At this point, I was starting to notice something about Paige. She hadn't cried since she was born. I mean, she made noise when she was hungry or needed changed, but it wasn't a cry.

Instead, Paige just made this whining noise louder and louder until she was acknowledged.

I had already asked Dr. Prince about it before we were released. She told me not to worry, that some babies don't full-on cry, that every baby was different and as long as her needs were met and she was developing, Paige would be fine.

Still, it puzzled me that she didn't make the loud, robust cries that Henry made. It made me worry that maybe something was wrong with her.

But she seemed healthy and strong, with pink tinged cheeks and bright eyes and an insatiable need to wiggle when she was awake.

She quieted as soon as I lifted her out of the bassinet. I changed her diaper and undid the buttons on my pajama shirt so I could feed her. She fed fine, hungrily even. I knew Dr. Prince was most likely right, that Paige was fine. But I'd never taken care of a newborn and every aspect of it made me nervous.

Once she was done eating and had been burped, I took her out into the living room.

"I was about to come wake you up," Spencer said with a smile. "I figured you would need to eat soon. They didn't give you much in the hospital."

Spencer had the takeout containers sitting on the coffee table. I promise we had an actual table in that apartment, but more often than not we ate at the coffee table while watching a movie or an episode of Dr. Who or something.

I spread Paige's blanket on the floor and laid her on it before turning on the Christmas tree lights for her. Yes, I still had the tree up in February, sue me. I had been pregnant and Spencer had a bum leg. I think we had perfectly good excuses to be late on our Christmas clean up.

Paige was entranced by the lights. Schroder came and laid beside her on the blanket. Instead of TV, we watched our daughter stare and coo at the lights, occasionally reaching her arm out like she was trying to grab them.

That was my sweet Paige Diana's first day at home. It was our first day as a family, really. No nurses or doctors coming in to check this or that. Just me, Spencer, and our baby. And it was _perfect_.


	21. Entry Twenty-One

I registered for all-online classes for my last semester of college, so I would be able to take care of Paige. A few years ago, it would have made me sad to have to go the online route instead of physically attending school. But I had lost interest in college after I started dating Spencer, and not because of infatuation or anything like that.

If Spencer has taught me anything, it's that you can learn so much on your own if you only know where to look. The articles and books Spencer has given me on psychology and schizophrenia have been infinitely more useful to me than the college classes I was taking at the time.

Paige was an easy baby. She was happiest when held, but would settle for simply being near you if you couldn't hold her at the moment. Like I've said before, she didn't really cry. It was more like progressively louder whining, and she only whined when she needed something.

It was easy to fall into a routine. I would do homework or clean or cook or whatever needed to be done while Paige was napping. When she was awake, my attention went right to her. I was just so enamored with the fact that I had this pretty little baby and she was mine to keep.

It was obvious even at a handful of days old that Paige's favorite part of the daily routine was when Spencer read to her.

Spencer doesn't always read Paige children's books. Even as a baby, sometimes he'd read her whatever he was reading. Now Paige begs to be read what Spencer or I are reading. She always tell Spencer, "I like pretending I'm a grown-up when you read me your books, Daddy".

As a baby, she was so serious about the whole thing that it was kind of funny. Spencer would take Paige and go to our bedroom. He would lay down on his side on the bed, Paige beside him, and read to her. Every day. And every day, Paige would look up at his face with the most serious expression I'd ever seen a baby make, her little eyebrows furrowed and her eyes completely fixed on Spencer.

She never fell asleep while Spencer read to her. Paige just watched and listened. When Spencer was done reading, it was like the serious spell that had fallen over our baby was broken and she would erupt into happy giggles and coos, as if congratulating her father for a job well done.

Derek would always tease Spencer about the routine.

"You're gonna make her into a super genius, smarter even than you. I don't think your fragile ego will be able to take it, kid."

Spencer, of course, would fire back with statistics and facts about the benefits of reading to babies and children. Derek would just smile and ruffle Spencer's hair.

Thanks to Hotch somehow getting Spencer some maternity leave time, I was able to see Maggie the next Sunday after Paige was born, actually. Paige was only a week old.

Spencer wasn't so sure I should go.

"Are you certain you feel up to it?" He asked me, while we were actually in the car, outside of the institution. I knew he was referring to how tired I was all the time, but of course I was tired. Since Paige was breastfed and I didn't have a pump at the time, I was the only one who could feed her.

"I'll be fine," I promised him with a kiss. "It'll only be an hour. She probably won't even wake up before then."

I mean, I didn't feel _awesome_, but I had seen Maggie in months. Of course I was going to jump at the first chance to see her.

"You look pale," was the first thing Maggie said to me. She was sitting in a slant of sunlight in the hallway, a book in her hands.

"We're redheads. We're always pale," I pointed out, but Maggie just shook her head.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

I rolled my eyes. "I'm _fine_. I swear, between you and Spencer I can't catch a break."

"Dad brought me pictures. She's pretty." Maggie put her book down and reached her hand out to twirl a piece of my hair. The prenatal vitamins I'd been taking while I was pregnant had made my hair grow a lot, and I hadn't bothered to cut it.

"She's perfect. I'll bring her when she's a little older, if I can."

Maggie looked troubled. "I guess you haven't noticed this."

She raised her arm for me to see, which was wrapped in thick white bandages.

"What happened?!" I almost shouted, taking her arm in my lap.

"The nurses said I was mumbling about how I needed to get _it_ out, but I wouldn't say what it was. I did it with my nails, they said. So now I'm going to keep them cut short."

Maggie showed me her hands—her nails had been cut extremely short.

I wondered how bad Maggie had been doing while I was pregnant. I didn't want to pry, and I certainly wasn't going to ask her doctors. I'd always felt like that was an invasion of privacy. I let Maggie tell me what she wanted to.

I think that first visit with Maggie after Paige was born made it obvious how different our lives were. I never gave it much thought, because it had pretty much always been this way. But suddenly we weren't identical anymore.

I had never seen the stark differences between myself and Maggie until we spent all those months apart.

"It was really hard without you visiting. I think it helps keep me a little more sane, seeing you, because it's like seeing myself without the schizophrenia."

"Oh, you don't want my life," I tried to joke. "I spend most of my time cleaning bodily fluids nowadays."

But Maggie's words had made my heart heavy. I knew, when we were separated, that it became harder for Maggie to keep her hold on sanity and the real world.

We spent our visiting time catching up. I told Maggie about Paige and Spencer. She caught me up on the goings-on at Bennington. It was over too soon.

"Please don't miss a Sunday again," Maggie pleaded with me when I hugged her goodbye.

"I won't," I promised. I hoped I'd be able to keep that promise.

When Spencer came to pick me up he said, "You were right, she didn't wake up."

"I told you. Other people are right sometimes, boy genius," I teased him, reaching over and ruffling his hair.

Paige was still asleep by the time we got home. I found one of Spencer's books on schizophrenia while he laid Paige down to finish her nap.

I was flipping through the book when Spencer came into the living room.

"Did something happen while you were at Bennington?"

I shook my head. "No, I'm more concerned with what happened while I _wasn't_ at Bennington. Maggie's arm was bandaged up. She'd scratched her own skin deep enough to need stitches."

When Maggie's schizophrenia became bad, it often became violent, too.

"You could just ask her, you know. Or ask her doctors."

I sighed. "I know, but it embarrasses her to talk about it. I feel bad asking the doctors. It feels like I'm going behind her back."

Spencer came to sit down behind me. He rubbed at his eye as he took the book from me, flipping to a section about self-harm.

"Are you okay?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I just have a headache. I think the lack of sleep has been getting to me."

Spencer doesn't sleep a whole lot, but he slept even less with our newborn. Usually we both got up, even though it only took one of us to tend to Paige's needs and get her back to sleep.

"Maybe you should go lay down, too," I suggested. Spencer shook his head.

"I'm fine. Read this section, it might give you a little more insight."

I settled down to read the passages Spencer had picked out while he turned on an episode of Dr. Who.

"I'm going to miss being lazy when I have to go back to work."

I smirked at him. "Don't pretend you don't miss playing the hero."

The book talked about schizophrenic hallucination in which the person believed there was something living and/or contained beneath their skin. This was a common hallucination for Maggie, so I wasn't all that surprised. There were a few cases cited of people cutting off whole limbs or removing large portions of their skin in an attempt to alleviate the hallucination.

I hoped it would never get to that point for Maggie.


	22. Entry Twenty-Two

Paige rolled over for the first time when she was two weeks old, and she learned how to do it from Schroder. He was napping in a warm stretch of sunlight coming in through the window. I had placed Paige in the same sunbeam on her blanket, on her stomach. Dr. Prince had told us even little babies needed 'tummy time'.

Schroder was laying the same way, napping on his stomach while Paige watched him intently. Then Schroder stretched his legs out and rolled from belly to back, so that he might warm his stomach in the sun. I laughed at Paige's look of utter surprise from my seat in one of our armchairs. I'd been strumming absentmindedly on my guitar, watching the two.

With a look I can only describe as determined, Paige looked hard at Schroder for a long moment before trying to throw her weight enough to roll herself over. I didn't think she would be able to do it—she was so little, and only two weeks old, as I said. But on her third try, she got enough momentum to roll over.

"Oh!" I had said, utterly surprised. Spencer was in our bedroom. Despite technically being on paternity leave, he was still doing work for the team at home.

"Let's see if you can do it again, and show Daddy," I'd told Paige as I picked her up. She was smiling a big, gummy grin, obviously proud of herself.

"Hi," Spencer said when we walked in the bedroom. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, a map of Wisconsin spread out before him. "I'm just doing some cartography work for the team. Will you send a picture of this to Garcia when I'm done?"

I laughed. Spencer still didn't know how to attach a picture to an email, even though I'd shown him a dozen times.

"Sure," I said, bending down to kiss him. "Someone has a trick to show you, if you aren't too busy."

Spencer immediately took his attention off of the map. He's always never been too busy for Paige. I handed her to him and then laid her blanket out on the floor.

"I'm not sure if she'll do it again," I admitted. "But she learned it from Schroder. Put her on her stomach."

Spencer laid Paige down carefully, kissing the top of her red curls.

"Watch her," I told him. As soon as Paige was on her stomach, she started rocking herself, trying to get onto her back again. It took fewer tries this time, and when she'd rolled completely over, she smiled up at Spencer.

When Spencer bent down to tell her what a smart girl she was, she kicked her legs and cooed.

"Babies don't typically have the strength to roll themselves over until they are four months old," Spencer told me. "But sometimes newborns can do it because, like a newborn's ability to swim, it's a leftover skill from the time spent in the womb."

I smirked at Spencer, having known he'd have some kind of scientific explanation for it. Like any mom, though, I was more inclined to believe that my child was especially talented than I was to believe science.

Which was odd for me in that time, because I had been delving farther and farther into the science of the mind. When I wasn't doing homework or taking care of Paige in those early weeks, I was reading more and more about schizophrenia.

I think Paige was a big motivator in wanting to know more about schizophrenia, specifically childhood-onset as Maggie had. I never much cared if I developed schizophrenia myself one day, but I felt compelled to_ know_ every time I looked at my lovely, healthy daughter.

Generally, nobody knows for sure what causes schizophrenia. It's a medical enigma, much the same way that no one knows what causes autism. The common consensus is that schizophrenia is caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors. It is also known, that for whatever reason, women are more susceptible to developing schizophrenia than men are.

The time from when most people develop schizophrenia is in their mid to late twenties.

When Paige was born, Spencer was twenty-five. He was on the cusp of the most nerve-wracking timeframe of his life. The next five years would hold the answer to how likely Spencer would be to inherit schizophrenia from Diana.

I was only twenty-two by comparison, but I've always been at a higher risk for developing schizophrenia as I shared my genetic makeup with Maggie.

Since Maggie and I were such a unique case, it wasn't like I could look up information about identical twins where only one twin succumbed to schizophrenia. So, it wasn't difficult for me to soon become frustrated with my research.

Understandably, as I was the easiest food source for Paige, I often had sleepless nights until she decided to start sleeping through the night—which was at a month old exactly. But around the time Paige was born, Spencer's bouts of insomnia seemed to multiply exponentially.

I remember I woke up with the horrible feeling that Paige was gone. It came out of the blue, while I was deep asleep, but it had me sitting bolt upright in bed. When I looked over to the bassinet, she _was _gone. And so was Spencer.

They were not hard to find, though. All I had to do was walk into the living room, and there was Spencer sprawled across the couch. He had Paige asleep on his chest, and Schroder was curled up at his feet. There was a stack of books on the floor beside him, and one was in his hands as he read it in that incredibly fast way of his. The pages were flying between his fingers, and the baby and Schroder seemed entirely content. I smiled and went back to bed.

Other times Spencer would be bent over asleep on the kitchen table when I'd gotten myself and Paige up, a notebook filled with his quick scrawls in front of him.

Even though he went to bed with me every night, it was not hard to figure out that Spencer was not sleeping at all at night.

And the headaches, they were getting more frequent. They made him testy. He didn't like to talk about them.

"You know, there's oils and stuff that are supposed to help with headaches and sleeplessness," I said on one of the last days Spencer was able to be home with us. I was sitting on the floor with Paige, catching her feet as she kicked and moving her legs back and forth. My father had told me it helped strengthened little babies' muscles.

Spencer sighed, and in that sigh was all the annoyance he worked hard to keep out of his voice.

"Most of that stuff has more to do with a placebo phenomenon than an actual effectiveness. There's a reason humans made stronger stuff to replace it." With that, Spencer got up from his reading spot in one of the recliners and retreated into our bedroom. Moments later, I heard the shower turn on.

I tried not to take it personally or anything. I mean, he had every right to be anxious and scared and stressed over it.

Spencer never has to say the word 'schizophrenia'. Neither of us do. It's always something unspoken between the two of us, a shared nightmare that doesn't have to have a voice. We both always know when that word is what is eating the other up inside.

Shortly after Paige was born was one of those times for Spencer.

* * *

**A/N:** My lovely readers, I know this chapter is much shorter than what I usually put out and I apologize for that. This semester has been so very busy! I wanted to get a chapter out, as I know it's been a while. I also wanted to tell all of y'all not to worry, that no matter how infrequent the updates might become, I WILL be finishing this story! I promise!


	23. Entry Twenty-Three

The very first case Spencer travelled for after Paige was born started a couple of traditions that still stand today.

It was scary, being alone with Paige for so long. There was no one to hand her to when I got inside my own head too much. I didn't quite have post-partum depression, but I was very young and did not feel at all ready to care for a child. Sometimes I would get myself too worked up and become anxious, in which case I would give Paige to Spencer until I calmed myself down.

But he was in Utah. It was just me and Paige. And I'm certain Paige noticed his absence, because her big brown eyes, so like Spencer's wandered around the apartment while a perplexed expression settled over her face.

Luckily, Paige was never an overly difficult or fussy baby. I was fortunate in that aspect.

I bathed her by myself for the first time and dressed her in a sleeping gown. With her propped up in my lap, I brushed out her red curls until she started to go slack with sleepiness. And then, instead of laying her down in her bassinet, I pulled back all the covers from Spencer's side of the bed and put her to rest there instead. I took Spencer's pillows and made a buffer, so she couldn't roll off the side of the bed.

With the bathroom door wide open so I could hear her, I got myself ready for bed. Thankfully, Paige didn't wake up at all while I myself took a bath, dried my hair, and brushed my teeth.

When I was done, I walked back into the bedroom to see Paige still happily asleep and Schroder laying on one of the pillows making up my barricade, keeping watch over the baby.

"Good boy, Schrody," I told him, giving him a scratch between his ears.

I didn't know co-sleeping was a thing or that I was doing it, having Paige in bed with me. All I knew was that I was terrified to have her away from me with only the two of us in the apartment.

I laid down on the bed and just looked at her. At her crown of curls, her long, long lashes, the sweet bow of her mouth, the nose that was a miniature of Spencer's.

Have you ever watched, or read, _The Grinch Who Stole Christmas_? Do you remember the part about the Grinch's heart growing in size? That's what I always feel when I stop to really think about Paige and the love I have for her. An up-swell of the heart, so powerful it's a wonder it doesn't break free of my chest. It is all consuming, but that night my heart also broke as it swelled.

It was easier, with Spencer around to take up my attention when Paige was asleep, to keep my mind wandering to my own mother. Ten months later, and I still couldn't see the mother who had once loved me so much and the one who slapped me and told me to abort my own child as the same woman.

I also couldn't reconcile what I felt for Paige with my mother's words and actions. I love Paige so much it actually scares me. There's not a thing in the world I wouldn't do for her. If my mother wanted me to abort her because there was a chance she'd have the schizophrenia that plagued Maggie, would she have aborted me and Maggie if she'd known what she does now? Would Eric be an only child? The dark cloud that hung over us, the mismatched identical twins, did not shadow our brother. Still a possibility, but, oh, such a small one compared to my own chances.

I picked Paige up and held her sleeping form close to my chest as the tears ran down my face. I could _never_ imagine getting rid of her, even if she turns out to be dealt the same card fate dealt my sister.

Schizophrenia and it's ever-present threat never scared me much until Paige came into my life. The possibility of leaving her parentless is infinitely scarier to me than my child developing the disease. At least I would be able to hold her hand, guide her through. That would be impossible if I joined my twin in Bennington.

"Oh, my poor child," I murmured against Paige's hair, which was damp again from my tears. "What have I brought you into?"

* * *

The tradition of Paige sleeping in bed with me while Spencer is away on cases may have had a sad beginning, but the other tradition did not.

Always, Spencer has called me when he is on the jet coming home. His consistency gives me a great deal of peace of mind. This first phone call started something new.

Since the day we brought Paige home, Spencer read to her daily. This routine was interrupted for a few days when Spencer returned to work. As I said before, I know that Paige noticed the change. I tried to fill the spot for her, continuing to read to her from the complete works of Edgar Alan Poe that Spencer had started. Heavy stuff for a newborn, I know, but the rhythm of the poems and vocabulary of the short stories were good verbal stimulation according to Spencer. Either way, _Annabel Lee_ is still a favorite of Paige's.

But I'll tell you, while Paige laid wrapped up in her blanket and looked up at me with a very polite expression, I didn't have the same effect Spencer did. I don't know if it's the strong command of his voice, as he reads aloud so confidently thanks to the eidetic memory that already knows the words flawlessly, or if it's something special and thoroughly _theirs_, but Paige was not enthralled the way she is when Spencer reads to her.

When Spencer called, I answered the phone expecting Spencer to tell me he was on his way home, as he always has. Which he did, but then he said, "Is Paige awake?"

"Yes," I told him. "She's just hanging out in her swing."

"Put the phone on speaker and then put the phone near her."

I did as he asked, already catching on to what he was getting at. I lifted Paige from her swing and laid her on the couch, where Spencer often read to her. Then I put the phone on the arm of the couch, where she could easily hear it.

"Okay, it's on speaker and Paige is ready."

"Hi," was all Spencer had to say to get a reaction. Paige was kicking her feet and cooing, a gummy smile on her face as her eyes searched for her father.

Spencer easily launched into the remainder of _The Masque of the Red Death_, which I had tried to finish for Paige. Honestly, Spencer didn't even need a book to know each and every word of the prose. It was all up in that impressive brain of his.

You better believe that Spencer's voice brought that serious, enraptured look back to Paige's face. Her little fair eyebrows knitted together and her kicking feet went still as she studiously listened to Spencer's voice over the phone.

Really, I think I should have known then that Paige was going to be a huge daddy's girl.


	24. Entry Twenty-Four

Even though it was three in the morning when Spencer got back from the case, I was awake. Schroder and I were lounging on the couch while I read with a lamp on. I also had the bedroom door open, so I could listen for Paige.

Spencer laughed when he saw us, Schroder perched on my shoulder like he was reading along with me.

"Gwen, what are you doing up?" I smiled when I saw him and put my book down so I could open my arms wide. Spencer came to me, giving me a hug and a kiss.

"I drank some coffee earlier, and I haven't had coffee in about ten months, and now I'm experiencing very adverse effects due to the coffee."

"One cup of coffee made you stay up all night?"

"Well…it had espresso in it…because Isaac made it." This made Spencer laugh again.

"There's your problem. If Isaac made it, you probably won't sleep all week. Is Paige sleeping?"

"Yeah, she's been sleeping all night. She hasn't woken up once." It was the first time Paige was sleeping through the night, and by all accounts, she should have been too young for it. She was only a month old. I was up partly because of the caffeine buzz and partly because I was freaked out and worried about her sleeping.

"Not at all? Is she breathing?" Spencer asked, and my heart just about stopped.

"Oh, my God! Yes, don't say things like that and scare me! I've been checking on her every fifteen minutes or so."

"Babies don't usually start sleeping through the night until they're about three months old."

"Yeah, well, she wasn't supposed to be able to roll over yet either." Despite Spencer saying it was probably a fluke, Paige still rolled herself over. Front to back or back to front, it didn't matter. She did it for everyone who came to visit; it was her go to trick.

"Face it, she's going to be a genius like you," I added. It was something I truly believed, even then. I will admit Paige was the only baby I'd ever spent a significant amount of time with, but from what I knew from baby books and comparisons Hotch and JJ had drawn between Paige and their children, she was not a typical baby.

For one thing, she was always alert. Paige didn't nap a lot. She was too busy observing: tracking Schroder around the room after I would crumple a piece of paper into a ball for him; watching Spencer's hands closely as he worked on Sudoku puzzles; cataloging my movements as I switched laundry from the washer to the dryer.

No little thing was too dull to spark Paige's fascination. What's the fun in napping, I suppose, when there's so much in the world you need to see?

She had already caught on to the ebb and flow of conversation—she loved talking, even if her words were still soft coos. And when Spencer would sit her in his lap to read, so that she could see the book, her eyes roamed all over the pages as her forehead creased with concentrations as if she were trying to decipher some kind of code.

"I don't know if that will be a blessing or a curse," Spencer mumbled so quietly I almost didn't hear him. He had made his way to the bedroom, to put his go bag away and to see Paige sleeping in her bassinet.

I bookmarked my place in my book and moved Schroder off my shoulder so I could follow him. Schroder meowed his opposition.

"Oh, hush," I told him, scratching him between his ears. He followed at my heels.

In the almost-dark of our bedroom, I watched as Spencer ran his finger down the length of our daughter's chubby cheek. In her sleep, Paige turned her face towards his hand, as if sensing it was the father she already adored.

"Spence," I whispered and wrapped an arm around his waist. "She's something else, huh?"

He nodded, but he didn't take his eyes off of Paige. His expression was almost sad.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"When did you realize Maggie wasn't the same as you?" I sighed and tugged on his hand, pulling him back to the living room where we could talk above hushed whispers. I should have known he'd been in his own head too much. The migraines he'd been getting were weighing heavy on his thoughts. I kept reminding him of all the changes in our lives lately, trying to bely his worry, but I'd been unsuccessful.

"I'm sure you've read stories about twins having a secret language," I started once we were back in the living room. I waited for him to nod before going on.

"I never had a secret language with Maggie, but she had one with…something else. There was the Floor People and the Gray Girl. Those were her two main hallucinations when we were little, but our parents chalked both up to an overactive imagination."

I do not like to talk about the Gray Girl. It is easier to talk about the Floor People, because in the right tone it is almost funny. But the Gray Girl is different.

"Maggie would talk to the Gray Girl in some kind of made-up language. I've never heard anything like it. It started when we were three or just barely four, I think."

I looked down at my lap. I had taken Spencer's hand into it, and I turned his hand palm up and traced out his name with my finger tip.

"The Gray Girl was the hallucination that told Maggie she needed to kill Eric. Sometimes, she would tell Maggie she needed to kill me, too, but not until Maggie went to Bennington. Maggie would tell me that the Gray Girl would say I was a fake Maggie, like a mirror image, and that I needed to die so Maggie could get out of Bennington. I went home from that visit and cut all my hair off, so Maggie could tell the difference between me and her."

I did not like to talk about Maggie's schizophrenia, much the same way Spencer did not like to talk about Diana's. For both of us, it was too scary to talk about something terrible that very well might be reality in a few years. But I guess Spencer was feeling inspired that night.

"I was six," Spencer said after a long pause. "My mom kept me from school and she didn't go to work that day. She didn't call into either. She said we couldn't use the phone, because 'they' would find us. Mom never told me who 'they' were, but while I was reading under the kitchen table, because according to her it was the only safe place, I realized my mom wasn't just quirky. There was something wrong with her."

You see, where Diana's schizophrenia had always been largely paranoia driven, Maggie's was consistently more violent. _If, _in some level of hell, I had to choose between the two for myself or Spencer of Paige, I would choose Diana's brand of schizophrenia over Maggie's any day. That, however, is truly choosing between the lesser of two evils.

"You got some headaches during the case, didn't you?" I asked. Spencer didn't meet my gaze, looking behind me instead. His gaze went into our bedroom, where Paige was sleeping.

"Yeah," he said, his voice breaking over the word. "I think I need to get them checked out."

While Spencer had a genetic chance of developing schizophrenia, he didn't have regular brain scans. I think I was probably the only one with a schizophrenia risk who actually did that. I was a lot closer, DNA-wise, to the threat than most people, though.

A gurgle from Paige burst our sad bubble, and we both stood up to go to her. She wasn't crying, though. She seemed content to be in the almost-dark, waving her tiny hands in the air at the mobile above her head.

When she realized we were in the room, she cooed louder until Spencer picked her up.

"Hi," he said to her. "It's been a few days, huh?"

Now Paige was smiling and waving her hand at him, reaching up and trying to touch his face. Spencer obliged her and bent his head, so she could softly smack her hand against his cheek. It was almost like she sensed he was home, so she decided to wake up to see him.

She babbled and laughed at Spencer non-stop for a few minutes, filling him in on all the things he'd missed. We laid down with her on our bed as 'talked' and every so often reached out to pat Spencer, like she was checking to make sure he was still there.

Spencer encouraged her chatter with 'Oh yeah?'s and 'Tell me about it's. Eventually, Paige talked herself back to sleep, her little pink eyelids fluttering despite her best efforts to fight them. Just like that, she was back asleep, her lips in a slack O shape.

"I don't know if there's such a thing as 'too perfect', but she's it," Spencer whispered, running a finger down Paige's cheek. I leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth in agreement.


	25. Entry Twenty-Five

Paige was four months old when life burst mine and Spencer's happy little family bubble we'd been living in. The genetic possibility that either of us, or our child, could develop schizophrenia was the only danger we had even thought of. I'm still not sure how we overlooked Spencer's working for the FBI or the fact that he'd nearly been killed on the job before.

It was such a beautiful day in May. I remember the weather was finally warm enough that I didn't have to force Paige's wiggly arms into the little jacket she hated. She was much happier in her little sundress, with both her arms and legs free.

Paige was also thrilled to be at a restaurant with Isaac, mostly because he played into her wants and had given her his spoon, which she was using to alternately hit the table and my legs as she sat on my lap.

Isaac was telling me how things were going on the bookstore. "Can you _please_ come back to work already? Let me tell you, Gwenyth," Isaac likes to use my full name when he's feeling 'serious', "you are the glue that kept the place together."

"Eric doesn't let you go take naps in the upstairs apartment, does he?" I teased him as I used my straw to give Paige a tiny taste of my Pepsi.

"No," Isaac said with an eye roll. "He's too cool, with that crazy fauxhawk and his jeans that I don't think have been washed in months."

Oh, Eric. My little brother, so close to being a legal adult, and so frustrated that he wasn't. He had chosen our father for primary custody, honestly kind of wrecked his hair with his at-home cut, and made a punk band with his friends.

"I could teach him a thing about eyeliner, too." Isaac continued, dipping his sweet potato fries in ranch while I made a face at him. I hate ranch.

"I'm pretty sure he wants it to look like he's slept in it for a month."

"Regardless, you _need_ to come back to work. It's not like you've been productive," Isaac added a wink after his tease. I mocked offense and lifted Paige off of my lap.

"Excuse you, I made a human being. That's pretty damn productive."

"A pretty cute one, too. A-plus, bring her along and she can help Uncle Isaac get boyfriends."

"Did you just grade my child?" I asked with a laugh.

"Yeah, and she got an A-plus, so you should definitely make more with your lover boy in the future."

"We'll see about that. Paige wasn't exactly planned," I reminded him. But I wouldn't lie and say the thought had crossed my mind. I also knew Spencer would love to have more kids. He had hated being an only child, and he didn't want Paige to feel the same.

I twirled one of Paige's curls around my finger as Isaac leaned across the table to coo at her.

"You wanna be a big sister, huh? You want a sibling _not _covered in fur, don't you?"

Paige smacked her hands against the table and laughed, reaching out for Isaac. I lifted her and passed her to Isaac over the table just as my phone rang.

Seeing Derek's number on the screen should have been a tip off for me. The last time Derek called me, it was because of Tobias.

But the sun was shining, and Paige was laughing as Isaac tickled her in his arms, and the combination lulled me into thinking nothing could be wrong in the world.

"Hello?" I answered, a laugh in my voice as I watched Paige try to struggle away from Isaac's hands.

"Gwen, I'm breaking the rules here again." Those words were enough to make my blood run cold. I held my arm out, and luckily Isaac understood, because he passed Paige back to me.

I tucked her close to my body. This insane feeling came over me; I literally _needed_ Paige with me, like her tiny being could lend me strength.

"W-what happened?"

It was such a faraway sensation, listening to the words Derek was speaking and feeling Paige resume her game of hitting the spoon against my leg.

_Anthrax_. He'd come into contact with it on a case. A specialized strand some mad man had created.

_Was he okay?_ Yes, they'd administered a cure for it in time. But he hadn't woken up yet.

They were in Maryland. That I already know. Maryland wasn't too terribly far from Virginia. I could be there in a short plane ride.

I was already writing a note on a napkin as Derek talked. I pushed it across the table to Isaac, then watched as his eyes grew wide as he read over it.

Isaac started talking as soon as I thanked and said goodbye to Derek.

"Go pack. I'll book you a flight and a hotel room."

I was trying not to cry. I mean, by all means, I was happy Spencer was okay. It was still scary to think that while I was bathing Paige and getting her ready to go eat lunch with Isaac, Spencer had been in jeopardy of dying.

Isaac came with me to mine and Spencer's apartment. I started throwing things in a suitcase as Isaac was on the phone, trying to get me a flight. While Paige cooed to me on the bed, I mechanically tossed in diapers and clothes and toiletries. I was happy, then, that Spencer had insisted we get Paige a passport when she was only a month old.

_"__With my work, you never know when she'll need it,"_ he had said. And like always, Spencer Reid had been right.

"You ready?" Isaac asked ten minutes later, poking his head in the bedroom. In his arms was Schroder. I had forgotten about him.

"Don't worry, I'll stay in D.C. while you're gone and take care of him."

"I knew you were my best friend for a reason," I told Isaac with a weak smile.

He drove us to the airport, where I was just in time for the flight. Isaac must have worked really hard to get me on the next available flight.

I was never more thankful for Paige's calm nature than I was on that flight. She napped happily in my lap. When she woke up, she didn't make a fuss at all. A lot of people complimented me on her, but all I could do was smile hollowly in return.

It felt like it took forever to get to Maryland, though I know it was actually a pretty short flight. I forewent the hotel, instead renting a car with an infant car seat to drive to the hospital Derek had texted me the name of.

Surprisingly, the nurse didn't question me when I asked for Spencer's room number. Probably because I had Paige with me. She probably assumed we were married, even though we weren't.

She led me right to his room. Derek was there, leaning back in a hospital chair and snacking on something.

"What are you eating?" I asked, dropping the bag I'd packed against the wall. Paige had fallen asleep again.

"Pretty Boy's pudding," Derek said, his mouth full of said pudding. I laughed a little at him. He and Spencer are just like brothers, really.

"They're sure he's okay?" I asked in a whisper, shifting Paige's weight in my arms.

Spencer looked pale and weak despite being asleep.

"Oh, yeah. Vitals are perfect, fluids are good. They're mostly keeping him just so they can monitor him and make sure he's good to go."

I sat down on the opposite side of Spencer's bed, trying to settle Paige and only succeeding in waking her up. Poor girl, her afternoon nap had been continuously disrupted by travelling. Still, rather than cry when she woke up, she went to surveying her new surroundings.

She looked around the white room, smiling when her eyes settled on my face. Then she looked around some more. When her eyes saw Spencer, she perked up, babbling and reaching a tiny hand out toward her father.

"Shh," I told her. "Your daddy is sleeping."

"No I'm not." The mumble made both Derek and I perk our heads up, looking towards Spencer. "Give me the baby."

I smiled, trying not to cry as I placed Paige in spencer's arms so that she wouldn't get tangled in Spencer's IVs.

"Hi, Paige," Spencer said, smiling as Paige threw herself forward to place her open mouth against his cheek. It was her approximation of a kiss, which she had recently learned.

With his free hand, Spencer leaned it across the bed so I could slip mine into it.

"What's that?" he asked Derek, turning his head to watch him scrape the last of the pudding from the cup.

"Your pudding."

Spencer gave him a half-hearted glare and turned to me.

"Is there more pudding?"

"I can go try to find some," I promised him, smiling over at him. I was just so happy he was awake.


End file.
